The Brief

KitKat’s iconic tagline, “Have a Break” was first introduced in 1957. While still loved around the world, they needed to introduce what it means to “Have a Break” to a generation of tech-savvy, digital natives who are interested in little more than staring at their screens. KitKat was seeking a mobile-focused activation that could be launched on their social channels and get this sought after audience re-engaged with the brand.

The creative execution

The solution was simple. Instead of trying to pry their eyes away from their phone’s screen, KitKat asked them to stare directly at them, only harder, for as long as they possibly could.

The Don’t Blink Break became the world’s first AI powered staring contest. Launched in social, it pitted players against an assortment of fun and furry animals to see who cracked (blinked) first.

Once the AI detected a player blinking, a shareable score was generated, and their rank was established in the international leaderboard.

We built our blink detection using an open-source computer vision algorithm called MediaPipe. While there are several models available within MediaPipe we used the Face Mesh model.

FaceMesh detects 468 unique landmarks from a human face. We honed in on the specific landmarks that represent the eyes. These “eye landmarks” are looped through our program continuously in realtime, where we then multiply the width to x, and height to y. That calculation gives us the pixel measurements that represent the relationships between different points on the eye.

We then create thresholds for the vertical landmark relationships, since the eye landmark relationships do not change horizontally when a blink occurs. These thresholds are then used to stop the game experience and store the users time down to the millisecond.

The users time spent playing is stored in a Firebase database and stack ranked against every other player from around the world. This allows the game to provide their sharable score along with the animal that finally got the best of them.

This combination of technology and experience design created the first ever international staring contest for the KitKat brand.

Example of Social Share: