The last few years have seen young people turn the stuffy world of finance and trading on its head, with meme-led shake ups making the news. This fresh take proved to be the perfect inspiration for our campaign to launch Wispa Gold Hazelnut Flavour (Wispa Gold HF).

The brief was to breathe some fresh life into one of Cadbury’s most iconic brands - Wispa. Despite being one of the highest-selling chocolate bars in the category, growth was slow and coming from a loyal fan base rather than new, younger consumers. The brand had stagnated. We needed to recruit the next generation.

‘A New Type Of Gold’ mimicked the world of trading, by letting our audience ‘invest’ in our limited edition bar. Fans could buy a #WispaGoldHF share and watch its value rise and fall with daily stock market updates on Twitter. The higher the share price rocketed, the more chocolate they’d received in the end, adding to the drama and excitement as the narrative unfolded.

The trading took place over the course of a week, with an action-packed storyline. We even closed our stock market for Bank Holiday, to make it feel as authentic an experience as possible for consumers. Influencer endorsements and interactive elements - like people being able to tweet to raise the share value - impacted the share price, leading to a great return on investment for our shareholders who received a bumper payout of 6 bars.

In order to recruit a younger demographic we avoided mainstream media and traditional channels - our communications strategy mimicked the ‘drop’ style releases you often see with highly sought after streetwear or from Gen Z’s favourite brands. With a communications strategy geared towards driving hype, we needed an insight that could power the campaign and generate social interaction. The insight into the lives of young people now finding themselves shoulder to shoulder with bankers, traders and investors helped unlock a powerful platform.

Strategically ‘A New Type Of Gold’ set us up to do two key things: 1) It placed the product on a massive pedestal as it announced it as a rare commodity and 2) It gave us licence to join a social conversation already found on platforms such as Twitter, piggybacking off the fan-fair found in crypto & trading helped make our media budgets go further.

The campaign ran from 19/08/21 to 03/09/21 and lived on Twitter, exclusively breaking on Wispa News, a 7-day livestream bulletin. The launch was like your typical IPO as people rushed to buy a share using our hashtag #WispaGoldHF which equated to one chocolate bar. Shareholders were then kept up to date over the course of a week-long interactive storyline which followed the progress of the share. With daily updates, live interactive challenges, twists in the narrative, and influencer endorsements which all impacted on the share value. With shareholders receiving a final payout of 6 bars delivered in a beautifully branded box with a shareholder certificate and ‘A New Type of Gold’ pin badge.

Our results were golden:

-Wispa Gold Hazelnut was the most successful singles chocolate bar launch of 2021.

-With the highest retail values sales generated in the first 4 weeks in the whole category

Our livestream cut-through:

-At its peak, 2k shares were sold in just over an hour alone via our livestream.

-We brought in 140k unique viewers

-Watching over 83k minutes of content

-On average traders watched 60” of content all on platforms where a view is deemed 3 seconds.

-Our campaign # trended no2 on Twitter

-The hashtag was used over 22.9k times organically

-‘A New Type of Gold’ gained over 9 million

-134 pieces of consumer, trade and media coverage

We hit our core objective of recruiting younger:

-Our sales over-indexed with younger pre-family,

-With 23% of sales coming from this cohort.

-It is the first time a Wispa brand has indexed younger in over 15 years.