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Heading to the DMV on your lunch hour? Not a break. Running errands between Zoom calls? Also, technically, not a break.
Kicking your feet up while several cheerfully enthusiastic men clean your house? Now we’re talking.
Kit Kat, part of the Hershey conglomerate, is reclaiming an iconic advertising tagline, creating its first character-driven ads and encouraging consumers to slow down long enough to savor a chocolate bar.
Finding that elusive downtime requires either a protector—someone to run interference—or a proxy—someone to, preferably, take on an unpleasant task. The new campaign, launching during tonight’s NCAA Championship game, plays with both concepts, according to Ryan Riess, vice president of brand strategy and creative development Hershey.
“It’s a universal truth that it’s important to take a break, but it’s only getting more difficult to do that, and it’s not going to get any easier,” Riess told ADWEEK. “You need help, and that’s the one job of the Break Brothers.”
Creatives at indie agency Orchard, working with Hershey for the first time, developed the quartet called the Break Brothers as a human personification of the brand. The group is made up of four burly men about the same height—between 6-foot-4 and 6-foot-6—dressed in identical brown three-piece suits. Look familiar? It’s an obvious reference to Kit Kat’s milk chocolate-covered, sectioned pieces.
And their reason for being: to hold space, if you will, for a few uninterrupted minutes.
As seen in the first ad, “Office,” the Break Brothers show up so that a cubicle jockey named Thomas can take a breather. They form a human shield between him and his hair-on-fire boss, cheerfully staring down the employer to deliver the message that “your boy’s on a crispy, creamy Kit Kat break.”
