Cadbury Creme Egg’s full-journey entertainment campaign with Amazon Ads

The company

Cadbury has been the nation’s favourite chocolate bar for nearly 200 years and was recently voted Brand of the Year 2019.1 Founded in Birmingham in 1824 by John Cadbury, the company believes that there is “a glass and a half” of generosity in everyone. Cadbury has a wide range of well-loved chocolate bars, sweets and beverages, including the iconic Cadbury Dairy Milk, Cadbury Roses, Cadbury Creme Egg, Bournville and new products such as Dark Milk and Freddo Little Treasures.

The challenge

Cadbury Creme Egg is the UK’s number-one confectionery brand in retail sales value at Easter.2 However, this leading position makes it challenging for Cadbury to increase brand penetration from their core audience. The brand drives most of its Creme Egg sales with the 35+ audience,3 who grew up loving this unique product. However, the brand wanted to attract more 18- to 34-year-olds who weren’t buying the products. The brand realized that their growth audience was paying attention to something else than chocolate – entertainment. In fact, while most people in the UK streamed an average 1 hour and 11 minutes, 16- to 34-year-olds watched more – two hours a day on average.4

To get through the noise and get their message across to the desired audience, the brand decided to provide entertainment, tapping into Creme Egg’s unique eating experience. Cadbury teamed up with the creative agency Elvis to launch “EATertainment”, Cadbury Creme Egg’s own streaming channel, to help engage 18-34 growth audiences. Cadbury and their media agency, The Story Lab, collaborated with Amazon Ads to support the entertainment marketing campaign’s appeal to an audience of 18- to 34-year-olds.

The solution

Extending from Cadbury Creme Egg’s “EATertainment” channel, Amazon Ads produced two entertaining short films, “All in Goo Time” and “The Eggscapade” (watch the videos here). We uploaded both films on Prime Video via Prime Video Direct.

Cadbury’s research has shown that every customer eats Creme Egg in their own way. They integrated different and unique eating experiences into the stories of the films. Each of them showed the characters eating this delicious treat in their own way while positioning the product as a hero prop that helped influenced the outcome of the story.

Amazon Ads ran a media campaign with the main goal of driving traffic to the short films on Prime Video. The campaign used high-impact creatives across IMDb, where the films were promoted similarly to a movie release, with a branded film title page, takeovers, and 6-second and 15-second pre-roll film trailers, as well as a Fire TV in-line banner and a Fire Tablet wake screen. They leveraged Amazon DSP with video and display ads to engage the relevant audiences anywhere they spend their time and drive them to Prime Video to watch the short films on Prime Video. They completed the experience by re-engaging audiences, after they had seen the films, to buy Creme Egg on Amazon.co.uk, via IMDb, Fire tablet and display ads, thereby helping to convert content views into sales for the brand.

“All in Goo Time”, a short firm that Cadbury and Amazon Ads produced.

The results

  • The campaign drove a strong GBP 1.35 ROI (return on investment) across offline and online sales.5 The IRI measured a 5% off-line sales uplift for Creme Egg during the campaign (versus 3% benchmark).6
  • Cadbury Creme eggs entered the "Best Sellers" on Amazon.co.uk for the first time for last two weeks of March and the first week of April 2020. 7
  • The 15-second video trailers on Amazon DSP achieved 82% video completion rate, 13% above benchmark.8
  • The Fire Tablet wake screen generated a 1.70% CTR, 59% above benchmark.9
quoteUpAmazon Ads and The Story Lab have really embraced the spirit of our marketing plans to ensure we stay relevant for the next generation of Cadbury’s Creme Egg fans. We are delighted with these results, both in terms of ROI and awareness.quoteDown
– Raphael Dario, Brand Manager, Cadbury

1 Marketing Week Masters Awards ‘Brand of the Year’, 2019
2 Nielsen data, Total Market, YTD up to 18/04/2020
3 Cadbury internal data
4 Ofcom Media Nation, August 2020
5 Information Resources, Incorporated (IRI), April 2020
6 Information Resources, Incorporated (IRI), April 2020
7 Amazon.co.uk, best sellers, April 2020
8 Amazon internal data, April 2020
9 Amazon internal data, April 2020

Highlights

  • GBP 1.35 strong ROI+ across offline and online sales
  • +5% offline sales uplift
  • 82% video completion rate on the Amazon DSP Video