5-Star chocolate's long-running "Eat 5-Star. Do Nothing." campaign is well-known for its counterculture take on the world. For several years now, the brand has been devising unusual ways to help 5-Star fans escape the ‘cringiness’ that surrounds Valentine’s Day and ‘do nothing’ instead. The campaigns have been massively popular, so much so that the 5 Star V-Day campaign has become an annual tradition that netizens look forward to. The popularity of past campaigns stands testament to the fact that there are thousands of people who find the day insufferable and would do anything to skip it - so we decided to do something about it.

We performed a ‘time travel’ experiment where passengers who hate Valentine’s Day successfully skipped the entire day, in just one minute. How? They boarded a vessel which crossed the International Date Line between American Samoa and Samoa at exactly 11:59 pm on 13 February 2024 (American Samoa Time), thereby skipping directly to 12:00am on 15 February - the local time on the other side. The entire operation was live-streamed to millions of viewers, and the campaign rapidly became the hottest topic across social media platforms, reaching over 230 million users, with 1 million+ users reposting the launch video.

While other chocolate brands run Valentine’s Day promos and offers, Cadbury 5 Star has been taking the opposite stance and mocking the hype around the occasion. Last year’s campaign was flooded with comments from users who felt the same way about Valentine’s Day and wished to skip the cringe. So we took their comments quite literally. We selected people who commented on our videos last year and helped them literally skip the entire day this time around.

We worked with partners in several countries to orchestrate the unusual stunt. The mission included a ship in American Samoa, a camera crew with satellite internet to livestream the event from the middle of the Pacific ocean, a control room in Mumbai, two extremely popular show hosts, and several calculations and dry-runs to get the timing just right. We scanned the ‘comments’ section of our ads from last year and identified people who had complained about Valentine’s Day. We invited them to become the first people in history to skip Valentine’s Day.

Further, we invited the audience to sign up for the mission as ‘mission engineers’ who could interact with the hosts on live chat during the livestream and influence mission decisions, and 980,000 users signed up for it.

Within days of the announcement, the launch video was shared by over 1 million people, and the news spread like wildfire. Our collaboration with one of India’s most famous space scientists came as a huge surprise to everyone, and further boosted the story’s virality. The upcoming mission was reported in hundreds of news websites and publications, with some news portals covering the event LIVE with realtime updates. The audience reacted by making their own memes, tributes and signing up for the mission on our online platform. The 30-minute livestream was watched by 1.2 million viewers, with 12,000 viewers actively interacting with the hosts in the livechat. The campaign became one of the most talked about topics during Valentine’s week. It was featured in the news in several countries, and earned over $8 million worth of organic PR, 1.3 Billion impressions and 2.2 Million interactions.