Milka is the leading chocolate bar brand in terms of market share, and the brand has been growing in recent years. However, the market share among young adult consumers is not growing at the same rate as the core target segment of Families with children. With stricter regulations and laws in recent years regarding marketing confectionary products to children, the category is struggling to connect to young adult consumers.

Therefore the brief was to activate GenZ and Families with children with an engaging on-pack promotion, centered around the brand purpose ‘inspiring acts of tenderness’.

The marketing objectives are to drive Penetration among young adults and expand Purchase Frequency among families with children.

To promote our tender tasting chocolate, we partnered with popular Dutch singer Snelle, and created an innovative brand activation. Primarily to help Gen Z, a demographic often struggling with emotional expression, convey their feelings with a song.

Our idea was to make it easier for people to share their feelings with a loved one. All they had to do is buy a Milka product – scan the QR code and enter their personal message. The rest was AI magic; using three unique AI engines together we turned every message into an authentic Snelle song lyric, performed by Snelle (vocal and video) which they could share.

Never before had AI been used to emulate an artist’s song writing and performance style. But more importantly; we fulfilled the brand purpose of ‘inspiring acts of tenderness’ by making it easy and entertaining to express your feelings.

We know that consumers respond more strongly to highly personalized communications, so our aim was to design the most personalized campaign ever. To do this we used each consumer’s unique prompt data to generate out an original song that they could then share with their loved one. This enables us to turn their feelings into data that we could match with the data model of Snelle’s original writing style to instantly create a fully bespoke unique song they could share. This meant each song generated was completely unique.

Our campaign idea was based on the classic Dutch proverb ‘if you can’t say it, sing it’. Which means (loosely translated): if you have trouble saying something, singing is better way to get your message across.

To bring the campaign to life we partnered with Gen Z’s favorite singer Snelle, who is loved for his unique emotional writing style, offering the Dutch consumers an accessible, entertaining, spectacular way to turn their feelings a into a unique original Snelle song. Making it easy to ‘Let Snelle sing it for you’.

We then built an adaptive mobile website allowing anyone to quickly access the song creation tool.

This tool combined three cutting edge AI engines:

ChatGPT to generate a personalized lyric, crafted on a data-model that was trained on Snelle’s unique writing style. The consumer prompt needed only to consist of a simple personal message and the recipient’s name.

UberDuck to turn the lyrics into audio, generated from original recordings of Snelle.

HeyGen to generate a lifelike video of Snelle singing the song, perfectly synched with the AI generated audio.

The result was an infinite number of unique songs, one for every prompt.

Our campaign launched nation-wide, with strategically placed Out of Home near supermarkets and key distribution points and paid and organic social media.

Our campaign started on February 5th 2024. With on-pack visibility in most major supermarkets and convenience stores, supported with targeted Out of Home around these strategic distribution points. And we added online visibility with some digital paid media (135.731.181 impressions) and of course owned media (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram).

Millions visited the mobile website, and over 80.000 unique Snelle songs have been created.

Key business impact:

During the campaign period, February – April, we were able to increase overall Milka sales by 38% without promo pressure compared to the same period the year before.

NOTE: at the time of this entry there is no brand tracker data available as this is a bi-yearly global study conducted by Milka.