Easter makes up 15% (Source: GFK) of all annual chocolate sales.  To put this into context, the UK population buys and eats just as much chocolate in the week running up to and including Easter as the month running up to Christmas. 2021, of course, presented some unique challenges.

The mood was low, and the buzz was gone. 

The ritual of gifting an Egg at Easter was in long-term decline as the tradition lacked relevance and excitement and was seen as ‘for children’. Easter is usually a time when the family comes together.  But a year into lockdown, social sentiment tracking showed the nation's mood was at an all-time low.

So, how could we get the buzz back? It wasn’t going to be so easy. HFSS regulation presented a new challenge and a long-term one at that. Any communications were going to be heavily restricted. Innovative thinking was needed to bring back the buzz.

Where has the excitement gone? Traditionally, the Easter Egg hunt was all about the excitement and anticipation of the hunt for the hunter. But what about the hider? That should come with plenty of excitement too. 

We decided to turn tradition on its head. We sought to turn our attention to the hiding of the eggs.

The Cadbury Worldwide Hide (CWH) was born.

The CWH was a bespoke digital platform where consumers across the nation were encouraged to hide an Easter egg anywhere in the world for a loved one.  This digital experience was all about encouraging the nation to HIDE an egg in a bid to bring back the spirit and buzz of giving at Easter.

At its core was the CWH platform itself, powered by Google Street View.  People were encouraged to hide an egg somewhere special and personal to them and the person they were hiding it for.  Perhaps where they had their first kiss or where they first met.

The gifter was then prompted to write a series of personalised clues to help the receiver find the hidden egg. The hider was given two options; either buy an egg from the Cadbury Easter range that their loved one would physically receive once they found the egg or send a virtual egg without needing to make a purchase. 

Creating a Media Ecosystem to drive participation.

We launched the campaign on Search using SEO and PPC to capitalise on those already looking for Easter gift ideas.

Once the platform had gained momentum, we switched on TV and OOH with a clear call to action to visit the site and hide an egg.

Using geo-targeted Social and Online Videos, we heroed where people had hidden eggs to inspire others to get involved.

First-party data was collected on the platform and was fed back to constantly optimise paid media.

Long story short. The buzz and excitement was back. The campaign reignited a generous spirit at Easter:

• The CWH platform received 2.6M visits with a total of 157k hours spent on site
• 809K virtual eggs were hidden. Now that’s a big Easter egg hunt. 

And all of this was done in an increasingly stringent digital advertising landscape in the face of HFSS. 

Critically, Cadbury future-proofed the brand as HFSS gets tighter and tighter:

• Cadbury increased its market share of Easter sales by 1.3pp
• We added 1m individuals to our first-party data bank.

I think we can all agree that this is an egg-ceptional example of how a brand egg-perience born out of empathy and creatively eggs-ecuted can uplift a nation's mood and help drive a brand’s data strategy.  (We’ll stop with the egg puns now).