The Campaign

Drawing on the adult colouring book craze, The Australian Crowd-Coloured Short Film was an animated short film that was split into 1,500 individual frames. Then we asked all of Australia to show their creativity and colour in an individual frame each. Every person that had their frame used in the final film had their name included the credits. The brand’s positioning was baked into the film’s story: A world that discovers the meaning of togetherness, triggered by Marvellous Creations’ signature candy pieces, which would become an important theme throughout the film. We then worked with a leading animation studio to draw up the characters, create the world, score the film, and outline every single frame. With that, we’d release the uncoloured short film and asked Australia to do the rest.

Creative Execution

The 1,500 frames were housed on our campaign website. There, fans could use our custom frame-painting tool on mobile, tablet or desktop to choose a frame and colour it in. We launched the campaign on our social media pages, inviting social media influencers and artists to participate and inspire the rest of the community, many of their beautiful frames can be seen in the final film. All our fans on Facebook and Twitter were invited to add their colour to a frame of the short film. The response was huge with thousands of frames from all over the world being contributed. Fans were excited to have the freedom to create their own content and unite as a group to produce an interactive film. Once the colouring phase of the campaign had ended, we trimmed the final submissions down to the 1500 frames needed to create the film.

We then sequenced them into the final film and premiered it on Youtube, Facebook and the Marvellous Creations website. Each contributor was able to see their work in the film, with their name fully displayed in the credits. The response was immediate. Thousands of frames began pouring in, each one filled with imagination and creativity. In total there was over 5000 frames from 22 different countries, despite only launching the campaign in Australia. When we premiered the film on Facebook, Youtube and our campaign website we collected over a 1,000,000 views and we delivered over 5,000,000 impressions.

Cadbury fans were able to work with us and create a film, changing the way traditional films are made. It was a unique use of media channels and of the medium itself. It was also important that the content they were creating didn’t feel like an ad. The final film was deliberately free of any Cadbury branding. This was a film made by the people of Australia for the people of Australia, not a run of the mill TV ad. Part art project, part branded content, the final film was viewed over a million times by people the world over.

If Marvellous Creations was to be the block that brings all of Australia together, there would be no space better than digital, where people from across country can not only interact but actively be involved with our campaign. We were going to invite all of Australia to be part of making the next Marvellous Creations film. Our previous work in the social space showed that Cadbury had a huge fan base that was highly engaged, often creating their own content to share with the Cadbury community unprompted and of their own accord. It made sense to leverage this and create a short film in collaboration with the community. With that in mind, we tapped into the adult colouring craze that was sweeping the nation. The combination of a current popular trend and our engaged social community allowed us to hit a sweet spot.