To communicate the 200th anniversary of Cadbury was no mean feat. Rooted in British culture for generations. But how could we demonstrate our relationship with the public and our brand value that got us to this bicentennial anniversary? Through the retelling of a story known and loved by the nation. The universally understood relationship between child and mother, showing ‘generous instinct’ has always been there. The founding value of Cadbury 200 years ago.

As a recreation of a classic Cadbury advert from 2018, the VFX team faced the huge challenge that the young actress was now six years older and looked completely different. AI was used as part of a layered approach to the compositing to help match the original actresses age and performance. We re-comped key features from our original girl’s face over an AI image as she moved through 200 years of history. In this way, the job combined new technologies with classic compositing.

After stabilising the old and new footage we trained an AI face-replacement tool on the original girl’s face. However, this only took us part of the way - key features such as the eyes and mouth still required a combination of classic VFX techniques. All whilst the ad seamlessly moved through the decades and backgrounds were matte painted to faithfully recreate Britain from the past.

Since the campaign went live, in terms of commercial results so far in the first 3 months since the launch, Cadbury has seen increases in value and volume share. Value has increased by 17.7% YoY and Volume by +4.3% YoY.

TV launched with 60”s and 30”s across Jan-Feb 2024, delivering 74% reach with a further 6.5M planned admissions on Cinema and 25m impacts on VOD. Across YouTube we delivered over 18M impressions and a unique reach of upwards of 15 million. Reach and Engagement from the campaign were scoped to reach 98% of the UK population.