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

Cornetto created the first-ever love confession ice cream vending machines in China. They were placed at multiple dating hotspots in 59 locations across 12 cities including major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Teens could customize their Cornettos with love confession wrappers that were printed out in real time and then give the ice cream to their beloved. The vending machine only responded to couples. First, facial recognition technology established that each couple was in love. That unlocked an on-screen, unique QR code that each person scanned to upload their own love confession via mobile. In real time the customized love confessions were printed out as Cornetto labels for the lovers to share. The sampling roadshow was also promoted using viral video in social and a tie up with the Chinese dining platform Dianping.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

The campaign alone a total of 11.7 million people took action and interacted with the campaign and 1.2 million people retweeted love confessions. In total the campaign delivered 1.9 billion impressions. 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.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

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. Cornetto created the first-ever love confession ice cream vending machines in China. They were placed at multiple dating hotspots in 59 locations across 12 cities including major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Teens could customize their Cornettos with love confession wrappers that were printed out in real time and then give the ice cream to their beloved.

Cornetto’s audience is the post ’95 generation in China, who are more conservative than their Western counterparts when it comes to love and dating. They spend little time with traditional media and are never more than a moment away from their smartphones. Every aspect of the campaign needed to be sociable in order to succeed and packaging was the first point of contact with specially designed ‘kissing Cornetto’ packs featuring Yixin Zhang and Jiamin Zhao, two young Chinese celebrities. The strategy for the sampling roadshow was to generate talkability in tow ways. Firstly, by bringing couples together in the real world to exchange love confessions in real time and secondly through innovative use of technology.