adam&eve\TBWA, one of the world’s leading creative agencies, consulted with Level to deliver the technology behind Twix’s 2025 Super Bowl campaign.
The challenge
A Super Bowl ad slot is the most expensive half-minute in advertising. Twix wanted the nation’s attention without paying for one, and it wanted that attention to land its new brand platform, “Two is More Than One”.
adam&eve\TBWA had the idea. Level was brought in to consult on how it'll work, live, for an audience counted in the hundreds of thousands, with real gold on the line.
The idea
79% of viewers reach for their phone during the Super Bowl. So instead of fighting the second screen, the campaign gave people a reason to stare at it.
The “Second Screen Staredown” invited viewers to Twix.com to stare at their phones through the ad breaks, for the chance to win two solid gold bars worth around $170,000. The phone’s front-facing camera tracked each player’s gaze in real time. The longer they held it, the better their odds, across all 31 ad breaks of the game.
Making a stare count
A stare sounds simple. Measuring one fairly, in a mobile browser, on whatever phone someone happens to own, during the biggest broadcast of the year, is not.
Level provided the technical consultation to bring the idea to life, working closely with Unit 9 on execution, architecture and security:
- An eye-tracking prototype for web and mobile, proving gaze could be measured reliably in the browser
- Architecture consultation and scalability planning for traffic that arrives in bursts, every ad break
- Game mechanics design, so time spent staring translated into fair, explainable odds
- Security integration, with encryption and decryption protecting gameplay from tampering
- End-to-end testing before a single real viewer arrived
With prizes this valuable, trust was part of the product. Every entry had to count, and every result had to stand up.
The results
The game ran through every break of the night and the numbers kept climbing:
- 760,000+ entries during the Super Bowl
- 1 billion+ impressions across the campaign
- 780+ media placements, worth an estimated $329M in equivalent paid media
- An average session of 25 minutes, with the longest stare lasting 1 hour 15 minutes and 29 seconds
The work went on to win a D&AD Yellow Pencil in Digital Marketing, alongside a Wood Pencil and a Graphite Pencil.
“Level are my go-to for anything digital. They grasp an idea instantly, deliver with pace, and scale it reliably to hundreds of thousands.”
What we took away
The best campaign technology disappears. Nobody playing the Staredown thought about camera frames or encryption. They thought about gold bars, and about not blinking.
Getting there meant proving the hardest part first, designing for the peak rather than the average, and treating fairness as an engineering requirement rather than a legal footnote. That’s the approach we bring to every activation where the idea is bold and the margin for error is zero.
