The Campaign

Young love is like ice cream. You have to act in the moment before it melts away. The goal was for Cornetto to be the innocent icebreaker to help young Chinese express their unexpressed emotions. The core creative idea was ‘Follow your heart, don’t wait’. The Cornetto product itself became the vehicle for emotional expression in the form of love confessions. To maintain relevance to the product and also generate talkability, the Cornetto love confessions ‘melted away’ if they were not read within 520 seconds (5 2 0 sounds the same as I Love You in mandarin Chinese).

Creative Execution

The campaign started with packaging. The “kissing Cornetto” packaging was scanned with a phone to launch the key mobile love confession interaction. People then selected their love confession from a range of Cornetto cone templates which they could send to that special someone. While the key campaign lived on mobile, it was backed up with digital OOH that animated the melting love confessions and Cornetto vending experiences in 59 locations across 12 cities that were triggered by image recognition. Teens could customize their Cornettos with love confessions that were printed out in real time. The vending component of the campaign was also supported with some kooky viral video content. General awareness was built through a series of fun, but somewhat less kooky 15 seconds films that ran in online TV environments as well as specially designed point of sale material.

Cornetto really opened the floodgates of unexpressed love in China. 38 million people took action and interacted with the campaign and 3 million teens confessed their love. In total the campaign delivered 1.9 billion impressions. Social sharing of the campaign generated 46 million RMB in media value for Cornetto. Most importantly the campaign delivered a 10.6% increase in volume sales year on year for Cornetto in China which was more than double the campaign KPI.

The campaign started with packaging. The “kissing Cornetto” packaging was scanned with a phone to launch the key mobile love confession interaction. People then selected their love confession from a range of Cornetto cone templates which they could send to that special someone. While the key campaign lived on mobile, it was backed up with digital OOH that animated the melting love confessions and Cornetto vending experiences in 59 locations across 12 cities that were triggered by image recognition.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

China is going through a generational shift in attitudes to relationships. A new generation of young Chinese are exploring romance and dating for the first time, without a cultural context to guide them. They are nervous and excited, but fear of rejection makes them hesitate to express their feelings. Cornetto’s brief was to position the brand as the innocent ice breaker for this new youth generation in China in a way that was relevant both culturally and in terms of media usage. The business goal was a volume sales increase of 4% or more. Cornetto’s digitally lead, integrated campaign opened the floodgates on a reservoir of unexpressed emotions, making the brand an innocent ice breaker for young Chinese to express their love confessions spontaneously, because young love is like ice cream, you have to act in the moment before it melts away.