Executive Summary

 

Creme Eggs are only on sale from January until Easter, so we needed a way to drive frenzied sales, fast. Our brief was to drive reach and engagement in order to drive the mental availability that contributes to our ultimate goal: brand growth.

We released limited edition White Chocolate Creme Eggs across the country, for people to find in stores. This not only drove sales of our core product, but also acted as a hook for our experiential activation, Creme Egg Camp, which gave people more chances to find the coveted product.

Creme Egg Camp was a fully immersive, ‘Hunting Season’ themed forest built from scratch in Old Street, London. It was a social event where people could hunt down delicious Creme Egg recipes, explore Creme Egg themed paraphernalia and search for the ultimate quarry - the lesser spotted White Creme Egg. 

The experiences we create for Creme Egg have become anticipated ‘events’ in press and influencers’ calendar, and 2018 was no different. Media coverage of the campaign doubled YoY, and coverage related to Camp alone created a huge 175 million OTS.

In social, we reached 23 million people, saw 79% positive sentiment and positively shifted brand recall and favourability with our content.

Bust most importantly, value sales of singles (our core product, and the variant that was the focus of the White Creme Egg promotion) grew by a massive 22.8% during the period the Camp was live (Source: IRI Data to 11th Feb).

 

 

 

 

The challenge

Creme Eggs are only on sale until Easter, so we needed a way to drive frenzied sales, fast. We had established a successful campaign the previous year, ‘Creme Egg Hunting Season’, and it was clear from consumer reaction that there was appetite to go hunting.

But our audience are driven more than anything by newness. With an unchanging product and a campaign they’d seen before, how could we make the world of Creme Egg Hunting Season so irresistibly desirable that we’d grow the brand even more than we did in 2017?

 

Objectives

 

Cadbury is a brand that buys into Byron Sharp’s ‘Laws of Growth’ - two key principles of this seminal piece of research are that brands grow by increasing their penetration, and that in order to do this, they must increase mental (and physical) availability. So our marketing objective was brand growth. To do this, our communications must always prioritise reach, but in order for that reach to be effective at driving mental availability we need to resonate with our audience. Therefore, our key communication objectives for this activity were reach among our target audience, and engagement.

We needed to keep our Hunting Season Campaign feeling fresh and exciting in year two, so the objective for our social event was to create an irresistible hook that consumers couldn’t ignore. We wanted them to feel like exploring the world of Hunting Season was a ‘must-do’ event in Q1 2018.

 

Strategy

 

Generating sales quickly is crucial for Cadbury Creme Egg, a product only on shelves for a few months each year.  Our Hunting Season campaign turns this problem on its head to drive desirability, and, crucially, urgency to purchase, by inventing a whole new season: Creme Egg Hunting Season. Hunting Season is that glorious time of year when for three precious months, these delicious delights swarm our streets ready to be caught, trapped, snaffled and poached. 

In 2018, we built a whole world around Creme Egg Hunting Season - a fully immersive experience that united Creme Egg fans.

We saw from our interactions with consumers across social media that there was a real appetite from our audience to ‘go hunting’, so our strategy was to let them do just that!  Our TVC introduced people to the world of Creme Egg Hunting Season, and then we enabled people to get involved for real.

We gave Creme Egg fans what they least expected: the chance to get their hands on one of a limited run of white chocolate Creme Eggs. We hid them in stores up and down the country, and the media, consumers and influencers went mad for what the press termed a ‘Willy-Wonka style hunt’. When we gave some away on social, forty thousand people entered. This simple, sales driving mechanic had kicked Hunting Season off with a bang.

The hunt reached fever pitch as the first lucky winners to find a White Creme Egg made the national news. And this was the perfect moment to announce something even bigger – Creme Egg Camp, an experience that gave the public another chance to find a coveted White Creme Egg.

White Creme Egg was the perfect hook for Creme Egg Camp - a fully immersive themed forest built from scratch in Old Street, London where people could go hunting for delicious chocolate eggs, experience our tasty core product at its best and share their experiences on social media – Instagramming, Snapping and Tweeting their way through each of our specially designed in-event photo opportunities.

 

Execution

Creme Egg Camp was central to our campaign. Over and above the physical experience, it created a set for all social, influencer and media partner content, ensuring all channels told different parts of the same story, and had consistent aesthetics.

Our audience spend their time and money going to Secret Cinema, Crystal Maze and Gingerline, so this needed to be something special. We designed everything from scratch, with Creme Egg’s branding and cheeky personality coming through wherever people looked – everything had an egg pun in it!

But we got the basics right too - the food was delicious and the experience of being in a forest in Shoreditch was like nothing people had ever seen.

As the Camp was created with reach in mind, we created specific photo opportunities for creating social content. Hashtags and snap codes carved into the trees ensured that visibility was maximised.

From eating Fon-goo in the tree house, people could slide down the tree trunk slide. From there they could hear an acoustic-guitar player sing Creme Egg songs around the campfire, take a photo in a giant nest (complete with giant Creme Eggs, of course).  If they found the clues in Eggsplorers’ HQ, they may even have found the White Creme Egg.

Our TV ad inspired the look and feel of the Creme Egg Camp, and all our social content gave consumers a taste of what it was like inside, while having broad enough appeal to resonate with people who were unable to participate in the physical event. On social we used short, mobile friendly video to show people how to make our deliciously gooey Fon-goo, and gave them an irresistible idea for pancake day - if they couldn’t try the recipes at Camp, they could make their own at home, using our tasty products.

 

Results

 

The White Creme Egg announcement saw 98,698,591 OTS over 125 pieces of coverage, and influencers such as Alfie and Zoella posted YouTube content, which was watched by 1 million people.

The announcement of Creme Egg Camp saw 175 million OTS, over 58 pieces of media coverage. 4,397 people took part in the experience itself, and 1,051 pieces of #CremeEggCamp content were generated. We raised over £25k for the Prince’s Trust.

UNILAD’s Camp Showcase video saw 3.7 million views, 9 million reach, and the Facebook live content they filmed in Creme Egg Camp was the most engaged branded live video UNILAD have ever created, with a huge 4.3 million views.

On Facebook, content supporting the campaign reached over 23 million people, and our average view-through rate was 18.35%. This content shifted recall by 6 pts and favourability by 4 pts.

Our Creme Egg Camp themed Snapchat lens saw 3 million impressions and 300k uses over 24 hours.

Value sales of singles grew 22.8% during the period the camp was live (Source: IRI Data to 11th Feb), which is incredible for a brand of this scale.

 

Client testimonial

 

For Hunting Season 2018, we knew we had to do something bigger and even better than we’d ever done before. Creme Eggs are only around for a few months of the year, and we created an integrated campaign that tapped into the passion of our fans to create a fully immersive experience and lots of delicious social content. A new TVC kicked off the season, and we hid rare White Creme Eggs in stores to create a frenzied egg hunt.  Just when our fans thought it couldn’t get any better, we built them a place to hunt for our deliciously gooey goodies to give them more of what they wanted.

Creme Egg Camp was built from the ground up as a fully immersive haven for Creme Egg fanatics to explore and hunt for delicious Creme Egg Campfire treats – including the rare White Creme Egg. But Camp also became the base of influencer and partnership content and its reach extended far beyond the trees. We partnered with Deliveroo to give people the chance to try our dishes and used Camp as the studio for all our social content too. The build was incredible, and most importantly, our fans absolutely loved it.

Aislinn Campbell, Brand Manager, Mondelēz