Because of the restrictive legal situation for surreptitious advertising and product placement in Germany, the development of ‘Branded Entertainment’ as a professional way of communication is still at its beginning.Because of the legal restrictions, ‘Ulf, der Pausenchef’ is one of the absolute pioneering campaigns of truly branded content by strictly using online media.Only since the change in the National Broadcasting Treaty in April 2010, product placement and its various forms are officially legal. Private stations are now given the possibility to integrate products into their program.

KIT KAT found the guy for the job “boss of the break” in the German version of the UK-Sitcom “The Office”: Ulf Steinke – a young, funny underdog who only works to have breaks. So Ulf got his own “KITcom”, proving in 15 funny webisodes what good breaks are all about. Produced in cooperation with the original cast and production team, the KIT KAT webisodes were a real extension to the TV show – on the same quality level only as a branded channel. The entire campaign pushed seamless convergence of online media. Traffic was created via Germany’s largest online channels that were relevant for the target group. KIT KAT entered into a relevant dialogue on relevant media channels like Facebook, YouTube, myspass.de and the Pro7 Pausenblog. Both, the new content and contact strategy worked in perfect synergy – this was not a small experiment, but a major “break” from tradition.

The new strategy worked. In fact: results easily exceeded those that would have been reached via the traditional TV centred strategy alone. In just 7 months, Ulf generated enormous response:1.5m active post views 80.4% more Facebook fans 95% view-to-end-rate for videos with the Break Boss by 4m unique users,On following channels: Pro7 Blog, YouTube, MySpass.de, Facebook1.498.847 shares/contacts with fans (only for editorial posts)4,290 ‘Shares’ and ‘Likes’Reach per day (on average): 37,372Click-through-rate: 0.36% (Industry benchmark FMCG: 0.29% for Rich Media & 0.11% for Standard-Banner)