M&M's Create with M&M's campaign, produced by Agência Chapéu in Brazil in 2023, repositions the confectionery brand as a catalyst for creativity and
How M&M's Create with M&M's Reframes Chocolate as a Creative Muse in Brazil
M&M's Create with M&M's is a 2023 Brazilian campaign by Agência Chapéu that repositions the iconic confectionery brand as a source of creative inspiration, inviting consumers to share M&M's-inspired artwork, culinary creations, and videos using the hashtag #createwithM&M's.
Published in March 2023 and produced in association with Centro Universitário Barão de Mauá in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, the campaign operates across Design, Digital, and Film media. Its central argument is direct: M&M's is more than a chocolate snack. The brand, in this framing, becomes a companion across the full arc of a consumer's life, present in childhood imaginative play and adult artistic ambition alike. The campaign video illustrates this by showing the candy transformed into a bright yellow sun in a child's coloring project and then appearing again as the sweet starting point for a fine artist's work. The continuity is intentional, positioning M&M's as a consistent thread in moments of making and expression rather than merely a moment of consumption.
The participation mechanic anchors the campaign's social dimension. Consumers in Brazil are invited to submit their own M&M's-inspired drawings, paintings, culinary experiments, and creative videos, connecting with fellow brand enthusiasts through the shared hashtag. This user-generated content structure transforms the audience from passive viewers into active co-creators, extending the campaign's reach beyond its single media asset. The Clapboard Score for Create with M&M's is 63 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's coherent creative concept and clear strategic intent, balanced against the modest scale of a student-agency production. The campaign's original Portuguese-language title, Crie com M&M, underscores its grounding in the Brazilian market and its intent to speak directly to local consumers in their own creative vernacular.
M&M's, manufactured by Mars, Incorporated, holds an estimated 13.9% share of the global confectionery market, according to marketsandata.com. That scale gives the brand substantial category presence, yet it also means the brand must work harder to remain emotionally differentiated in markets like Brazil, where confectionery competition is intense and consumer expectations of brand storytelling are rising.
The strategic rationale behind Create with M&M's rests on a clear consumer insight: creativity is a universal human impulse, and brands that position themselves as enablers of that impulse earn a more durable emotional relationship than those that simply offer a product benefit. By spanning childhood and adulthood in its narrative, the campaign reaches across demographic segments without fragmenting its message. The choice to invite user-generated content through the #createwithM&M's hashtag further deepens this relationship, giving Brazilian consumers an active role in the brand's creative identity rather than a passive one.
This strategic move places M&M's in deliberate contrast with how the brand has historically operated globally. As documented by campaignlive.com, M&M's pre-2023 advertising relied heavily on its animated spokescandies — Red, Yellow, Green, Orange, Blue, and Brown — using character-driven comedy as the primary brand vehicle. Create with M&M's departs from that playbook entirely, centering real people and genuine creative acts rather than animated personalities. In the Brazilian confectionery market, where competitors such as Nestlé and Ferrero maintain strong local presences and consistent investment in emotional brand narratives, this pivot toward creativity and consumer participation represents a meaningful strategic differentiation. The campaign acknowledges that in a maturing snacks and food category, lifestyle relevance — not product attributes — is the most defensible competitive ground.
Agência Chapéu built the creative execution of Create with M&M's around a single, sustained visual metaphor: the candy itself as an instrument of making. The campaign video traces this metaphor across two life stages, using M&M's not as a prop to be consumed but as a material to be transformed. A child incorporates the candy's signature yellow into a sun she is coloring. An adult artist finds the same candy a source of fine-art inspiration. The ellipsis between these two moments is the campaign's real creative argument — that the imaginative instinct survives from childhood into adult creative life, and that M&M's is present for both.
The creative team at Agência Chapéu responsible for this work includes Bianca Nonaka and Vítor Sávio in art direction, Lorenzo Ferlin in copywriting, and collaborators Lorrayne Bagatini, Maria Fernanda Sombrero, and Vítor Machado. The campaign was produced through Centro Universitário Barão de Mauá in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, situating it within an academic production context that shapes both its ambitions and its constraints. Despite operating at student-campaign scale, the creative team demonstrates a disciplined understanding of brand repositioning: every visual choice reinforces the campaign's core proposition rather than decorating around it.
The decision to work across Design, Digital, and Film media classifications reflects an awareness that the campaign's participation mechanic requires multiple touchpoints. The film establishes the emotional and conceptual territory. The digital channel, anchored by the #createwithM&M's hashtag, provides the infrastructure for consumer response. The design dimension ensures that the visual language of M&M's — its colors, its forms, its tactile presence — translates coherently across each medium. For a single-asset campaign in the Brazilian snacks and confectionery category, the creative economy on display is notable.
Create with M&M's accumulated 1,630 views and 14 likes on the platform where it was submitted, according to data recorded by Clapboard. These figures reflect the campaign's student-production context and its circulation within creative industry and advertising archive audiences rather than a mass-consumer media buy. No verified broader performance data — including social reach, hashtag volume, or brand-lift metrics tied to the Brazilian market — is publicly available for this campaign.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on the integrity of its participation mechanic. User-generated content campaigns in the food and snacks category succeed when the invitation is specific enough to guide behavior but open enough to reward personal expression. Create with M&M's achieves this balance: asking for artwork, culinary creations, drawings, paintings, and videos gives consumers genuine creative latitude while keeping M&M's at the center of every submission. The hashtag #createwithM&M's provides the connective tissue that transforms individual acts of making into a visible community, which is the condition under which such campaigns generate sustained brand engagement beyond their initial media moment.
The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 for this campaign reflects a concept that is strategically coherent and creatively disciplined, with appropriate deductions for the limited production scale and the absence of verifiable consumer-reach data. As a student campaign originating from Agência Chapéu and Centro Universitário Barão de Mauá, it demonstrates a level of strategic maturity that exceeds its institutional context, particularly in its clear departure from M&M's character-led advertising heritage and its confident repositioning of the brand within Brazilian creative culture.
Create with M&M's is a 2023 Brazilian campaign by Agência Chapéu that repositions M&M's as a source of creative inspiration. It invites consumers to share M&M's-inspired artwork, culinary creations, and videos using the hashtag #createwithM&M's, framing the confectionery brand as a companion across creative life from childhood to adulthood.
Agência Chapéu created the campaign, produced through Centro Universitário Barão de Mauá in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. The creative team includes Bianca Nonaka and Vítor Sávio in art direction, Lorenzo Ferlin in copywriting, alongside collaborators Lorrayne Bagatini, Maria Fernanda Sombrero, and Vítor Machado. It was published in March 2023.
M&M's previous global advertising centered on its animated spokescandies, using character-driven comedy as the primary brand vehicle, as documented by campaignlive.com. Create with M&M's departs from that approach entirely, featuring real people and genuine creative acts, repositioning the brand from a comedic character prop into a creative muse for Brazilian consumers.
Create with M&M's receives a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a strategically coherent and creatively disciplined concept, with appropriate consideration for the campaign's student-production scale and the limited availability of verified consumer-reach data from the Brazilian market.
The campaign invites Brazilian consumers to share M&M's-inspired drawings, paintings, culinary creations, and videos using the hashtag #createwithM&M's. This user-generated content mechanic transforms the audience into active co-creators, extending the campaign's reach beyond its single media asset and building a visible community of brand enthusiasts.
Create with M&M's operates across Design, Digital, and Film media classifications, according to Clapboard. The film establishes the campaign's emotional territory, the digital channel provides the hashtag-driven participation infrastructure, and the design dimension ensures M&M's visual identity translates coherently across each format within the Brazilian confectionery market.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
