Egypt’s youth found their voice on social media during the Arab Spring revolution. And they loved what they heard! Young consumers now voice their opinions and share them widely online – in a very notable way. Comic satire is hugely popular and they love to make fun of anything and everything - including brands that make changes they don’t like.

With no ‘sellable’ communications message, we decided to embrace this creative sense of humour and ask young consumers themselves to come up with reasons why Mandolin was launching a twin bar pack. We not only welcomed the inevitable mocking, we joined in and made it central to our campaign. That way, we could get the satirical brand bashing out of the way, up front. And show consumers that Cadbury Mandolin’s sense of humour matched their own!

We launched one simple post on Facebook, asking Egypt’s youth why they thought Cadbury’s Mandolin would create a single serve in two bars?

The humorous responses came flooding in - more than 3,500 posts! And Mandolin replied with equal wit to keep the banter going. To Muhamed EL Hadary, who suggested it ‘was so chocolate-lovers could consume the bar with a loved one’; our response was that ‘we weren’t that romantic’.

To amplify the reach and the fun, we turned our favourite, consumer posts - and Mandolin’s replies – into a digital video starring Egypt’s most popular celebrity comedian; who brought his huge social following to the brand.

Consumers were desperate to have their opinions, and Mandolin’s playful teasing, included in the video. So, we created the #whytwinbars hashtag, asking them to send us more ideas – with the reward that the most creative responses would star in our next

Our winning strategy translated to a huge sales hike –Mandolin twin bar packs went out of stock after just three weeks of our campaign airing!

•Value share shot up 50% during the campaign, up from 2% to 3%

•Volume share increased 1.8%

•Sales value soared 5% during the last month of the campaign

The humorous content connected with customers, prompting sky-high brand engagement and social sharing. Our video alone attracted 4.5 million views on social, including:

•2.5 million Facebook views, AND more than 100,000 interactions (likes, reactions, shares and comments)

•1.8 million YouTube views - an exceptional view rate of 28.4% (vs 17%-19% industry average)

•175,000 views on Twitter, and an extraordinarily high engagement rate of 27.2% (vs 8% industry average)

Our campaign was recognised by the biggest social websites in Egypt and the video was featured by YouTube in the top 10 Ramadan ads in MENA (Google lantern award).