Mars to target youth

D’Arcy is understood to be working on a major advertising campaign for the Mars Bar, in a bid to rejuvenate and modernise the brand.

Creative teams from around the world are understood to be pooling their thinking to come up with a global advertising campaign for the brand, made popular in the Seventies with the advertising slogan: “A Mars a Day Helps You Work, Rest and Play”.

The campaign is expected to break in March next year. Overall responsibility for Mars Bar in the global markets is with D’Arcy. And Mars is believed to spend &£10m in the UK alone to promote Mars Bar.

The European board account director at D’Arcy, Chris Palengat is also understood to have recently discussed devising a new campaign for the brand, while drawing comparisons with the funky “Whassup” campaign for Budweiser.

Mars denies that it is considering a repositioning of the Mars Bar brand. At the same time, the company has also just rolled-out the mini-bar version of the Mars Bar, called 5 Little Ones, to target the younger 16-34 year-old market.

The new bar, which claims to have only 1.4 gms of fat in each bar and is priced at 29p a packet, is to target chocoholic women and promote a “guilt-free chocolate bar”.

An advertising campaign is to follow the launch of the 5 Little Ones later this year.

A spokeswoman for Mars says: “We are not looking at the repositioning of the Mars Bar. This could be a reference to the launch of the new Mars 5 Little Ones and there could be some confusion on this.”

A recent campaign for Mars Bars, created by D’ Arcy, includes the “Everyday should be this good” advertising, rolled out earlier this year.