With Easter coming early in 2008, Cadbury was keen to improve upon the previous year’s Creme Egg sales in a shorter sales period. Cadbury was looking for a new way to engage with the target audience of 16-24 year olds, moving away from the 23 year old ‘how do you eat yours?’ campaign.
The key consumer insight was that people have a unique experience of the Creme Egg brand. Unlike other chocolate products, Creme Egg brand values are lived through its consumption, developing a unique consumer connection. For the youth audience Creme Egg is all about play, so the communication strategy was based on bringing Creme Egg to life through play. The return of Creme Egg was announced through homepage takeovers, placement of the TV ads online, search, Yahoo spoof editorial and synchronized display formats targeted to the core audience. Creme Egg integrated with Bebo’s hit online soap opera Kate Modern by creating a fake live event in central London. A Creme Egg Bebo profile page enabled consumer conversation and a place to host the Creme Egg content. It also specially commissioned episodes of cult online series Weebl and Bob and hosted it on movie-themed website goovies.co.uk. There were spoofs of cult films (including Goobusters, Goo and the City and the Wizard of Goo) and introduced the new Creme Egg character.
As a result, there were over 3.5m visits to the microsite, 120,000 WAP site visits and 105,000 mobile game downloads. 180 million more Creme Eggs were sold - a sales increase of 1.8% year-on-year.