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“Detectives used a partially eaten Snickers found at the Daugherty’s Veterinary Clinic on Central Entrance to track down the suspect in its January 2011 burglary. Police sent the nougat-filled chocolate bar to the state Crime Laboratory, where medical examiners obtained DNA, Duluth detective Gordon Hansen said.” ~ Duluth News Tribune

The initial news reports went like this. A half-eaten candy bar left on a counter at the Daugherty’s Veterinary Clinic during a Jan. 24 robbery contained enough DNA to convict Ben Hellerman, 39 of Two Harbors. It wasn’t till months later that detectives learned that they had been set up, and the crime was part of an elaborate marketing scheme by the Mars Company to pump up dwindling sales for their once leading Snickers brand.

Here’s the rest of the story. It turns out that the Roscoe & Hermann Agency, a PR firm from New Jersey, set the guy up. Hellerman was apparently unaware that he’d become part of a clandestine marketing scheme. Barry Adams, a mid-level manager at the firm, told Hellerman that the company would get him off within sixty days. The marketing plan was nixed in the Snickers board room after legal review, but no one notified Adams or Hellerman.

Hellerman’s actions were intended to be part of a branding event designed to get the Snickers brand name into headlines across the country. According to unnamed sources, more than a dozen burglaries had been slated for the same weekend, with Snickers bars to be inadvertently left at the scene of each crime. The underlying message to criminals: “This is the candy bar that bad guys eat.”

The plan appeared to include major rollouts of Snickers inventories to prison vending machines around the country, including Camp Walk-away here in Duluth. Right before the story broke, prisons in all fifty states had become buried in pallet-loads of Snickers products.

When the Hellerman story caught national headlines, requests from inmates for Snickers candy bars became a trickle and then a flood. The story re-surfaced this past month when Advertising Age applauded Mars, Inc. for the scheme, calling it one of the top ten original ideas in PR from the past ten years. “Kudos to Snickers for identifying this untapped market of 2 million incarcerated Americans. The marketing plan is a bit nutty, but sweet.”

Because Snickers distribution pipelines were apparently in place before the news story hit the wires, two Minnesota legislators, including Roger Reinert of Duluth, have lobbied the FTC for a deeper investigation.