Our brief was to retain Creme Egg’s spot as the number one brand at Easter and drive sales. To do this we needed to drive impulse in-store and ensure Creme Egg was top of mind among a broad audience - retaining Creme Egg’s cheeky and youthful draw without alienating the core over 45s purchasers.

‘How do you eat yours?’ is an old iconic campaign for Creme Egg, and this year Cadbury brought it back, but with a fresh twist. 146 prize winning Creme Eggs were hidden in stores across the UK worth upto 10K. But if you found one, you weren’t allowed to eat it. It was now ‘How do you NOT eat yours?’

We took the simple find-to-win mechanic and added some jeopardy to the promotion. In order to win your prize, you absolutely, 100% could NOT eat the egg. Cadbury Creme Egg realised how difficult this could be for some, so went about warning the nation. Everyone, everywhere was told not to eat the deliciously tempting winning egg. And for those unlucky enough to win an egg they couldn’t eat? Well they had to phone in, resist the temptation and only then would they receive their prize.

Sales promotions are often an extension of a campaign, based on an adapted key visual and a tangential link to advertising, but for Creme Egg, we wanted to create a campaign with a promotion at the very heart of it.

We needed to develop an activation that could drive taste appeal by playing on the irresistibility of Creme Eggs and get Brits (from youngsters all the way to the ‘young-at-heart’) talking. So we flipped a conventional promotion on its head. If you ate your winning egg, you couldn’t win the prize money. This jeopardy for the winners enabled us to base our whole campaign around one universal human insight: temptation. With this singular focus, everything - from FSDUs to radio ads to a line of merchandise - was centred around the unique product and our impulsive urge to eat it, no matter the consequences.

The integrated campaign ran from January to April and was supported across BVOD, YouTube, Social, Radio, Outdoor, and via influencer partner channels. The campaign twisted the usual hype of a promotion, with the possibility of eating £10K, Creme Egg warned the nation, instore, on social, outdoor, and radio to NOT eat the winning egg. Creme Egg even partnered with a top fashion designer to create a collection specifically designed to help stop people from eating theirs. Whilst our BVOD films showed the public disappointed by finding a winning egg they couldn't eat.

It’s set to be a record-breaking year for Creme Egg, with a sales forecast increase of 9.8% vs 2021. The campaign also achieved a PR reach of over 350 million people in over 250 titles, far beyond its media budget, due to its talkability and the debate it created among the public. YouGov found Creme Egg to be the UK’s biggest brand mover in March, with an uplift across all three metrics - media metrics, brand health, and purchase funnel.

The campaign created such a buzz, that supermarket chain ASDA had to hire additional security to guard the eggs. It was also the first time EVER supermarket chain Morrissons have taken a branded seasonal campaign into their stores, where they saw a 44% growth in sales of Creme Eggs.