The Brief

New Zealanders are renowned for their upbeat attitudes, but a series of disasters around the country over the past year have been rather sobering. As a company that literally sells little moments of joy, Cadbury wanted to remind their main target, families, that they could still find joy in the everyday without looking like we were capitalizing on the nations tragedy. We knew that watching it on a screen wouldn’t be enough; we needed people to feel the joy face-to-face. We needed to create a promotion the whole country would be involved in.

Creative Execution

Given the sombre nature of the tragedies it was imperative that the experiential and PR campaign wasn’t perceived by the media as being glib or, worse still, capitalizing on the loss of life. We chose to launch the campaign at Christmas time, when the act of giving is celebrated. To kick off the campaign we needed a marquee event in Auckland, our biggest city that the media would be forced to cover. To do this we needed an event that defied reason and rationality, so we made it snow in a city that hasn’t seen snow in over 70 years.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Those not involved directly in the tragedies in New Zealand were feeling guilty about experiencing any joy, while those people in the midst of the crisis were still looking for moments of light relief. Cadbury was well placed to offer them an outlet to both create and experience moments of joy again. The Share the Joy project reminded people that there was joy all around them and inspire them to look for it in the everyday. We created a nationwide experiential campaign that used a PR as a main driver for participation in the event.

Results

In just 12 days we had over 35,000 visitors inside the snow globe, with more than 126,000 spectators outside and visits to the website went up 500%. The snow globe changed our target ‘s perception of the brand with close to 50% of them feeling more positive toward Cadbury after visiting it. And we maintained Cadbury Dairy Milk’s share while increasing the retail price by 125% as sales lifted between 16-27%. All the top New Zealand media outlets covered the story, gaining over $300,000 worth of earned media with a reach of more than 4 million.