Our core idea was to create a platform that would bring people together through the power of football.

So we created Cadbury FC - a football club for everyone, no matter what their allegiance, nationality or their level of interest in football.

At the very heart of Cadbury FC, are shared experiences, and everything we do is aimed towards giving people the opportunity to get closer to the people they care about, by creating via unique and memorable experiences.

To do this in an authentic way, we formed a partnership with the Premier League, which enabled us to gain unique access to football on many different levels and an extensive range of assets.

The partnership of these two iconic brands ensured that Cadbury FC became a means to engage multiple stakeholder groups - consumers, retailers and employees.

Insight showed us that football is the UK’s largest cultural interest point, with over 15 million people engaging with it every week, it is a sport which everyone is connected to in some way. This might be a fan who watches their team every weekend, an occasional participant in 5-a-side football, a parent who spends their weekend watching their children play, or an occasional viewer.

Football was identified as a naturally scalable platform for marketing activity, where our partnership with the Premier League gave us the opportunity to create unique executions which would engage consumers. This knowledge, in addition to Cadbury’s core values of “togetherness”, led to our creative idea, Cadbury FC - a club that connects people, via football, through shared moments of excitement, passion and togetherness.

The partnership with the Premier League was the perfect strategy to deliver this, as it allowed exclusive access to football.

With Cadbury FC as our symbol and shared experiences as our guiding principle, our primary activation was ‘Match & Win’, a campaign incentivising consumers to purchase a product for a chance to win their ultimate VIP Premier League experience, along with many other football-related prizes.

Leveraging the distinctive IP of both Cadbury and the Premier League, between 1st August to 30th November 2018 we implemented the campaign on 203 million product packs; in 90,000 retail touchpoints; and an integrated media campaign including OOH, digital and social media. All of which reached 90% of the population at least 13 times.

Central to our partnership programme, we have given people access to unprecedented football experiences. People could win ‘money can’t buy’ experiences ranging from playing a 5-a-side game with Thierry Henry, presenting the Golden Boot trophy to Mo Salah, and playing on the hallowed turf of Manchester United.

Over the past year, our partnership activities have driven unprecedented results for both Cadbury and the Premier League.

With a retail-first approach, we have been able to appeal to consumers at point of purchase, and leverage the scale of Cadbury’s distribution to grow revenue. This scale has also significantly extended the Premier League’s reach into retail channels, supporting the growth and exposure of the Premier League brand across the UK.

The foundation of Cadbury revenue growth has been the increase in our visibility, which has been obtained by working in collaboration with retailers, buoyed by the prospect of implementing exciting Premier League activations in their stores.

For the Premier League, this partnership has provided a large scale, incremental exposure platform for its brand and IP, unachievable without this partnership.

For Cadbury, it has helped redefine its approach to marketing, resulting in best-in-class activation campaigns and quantifiable business success.