The Hungerithm is like a stock exchange for Snickers chocolate bars. Prices fluctuate in real time, based on the internet’s mood.
When anger goes up, Snickers prices go down at every 7‑Eleven store. Prices are updated 144 times a day and drop as low as 82% off the normal shelf price.
My role
As Technical Director, my role involved:
- Liaise with internal and external stakeholders to help with creative, scoping, client pitches, and global markets negotiations.
- Design and architect the end-to-end solution for global rollout across Australia, America, Russia, Europe and South-East Asia.
- Lead a small team of 3 developers and a tester to build, test and deploy the project worldwide.
- Prototype solutions for the unknowns and the most complex parts of the build.
Key results
- 67% sales increase in Australia.
- 30 million media impressions and a 1,740% rise in social traffic after the initial launch.
- Won multiple awards, including a Gold Cannes Lion and a Webby Award.
Technology
Built on Google’s natural language models, the Hungerithm is a bespoke service scanning over 14,000 Twitter posts a day. The internet’s mood, which affects the chocolate bar price in real time, is calculated by extracting sentiment and processing the output into a bespoke algorithm that can normally distribute and deviate results over time. It understands slang, sarcasm, emojis, and differences in context.
The interactive client-side interface was built with Vue and allowed customers to monitor fluctuating prices and redeem coupons in real time. It was engineered around AA accessibility requirements and the ability to switch locales, currencies, and reading direction based on local market needs. A bespoke interface was also created for community managers to moderate all public content appearing on the client-side interface.
The infrastructure was built and deployed on Amazon AWS using infrastructure-as-code, with a centralised GraphQL API and a serverless architecture leveraging services like Fargate, Aurora, Lambda, S3, and CloudFront. It was designed to be easily deployed in different regions and markets.
