Selling ‘Cadbury-Celebrations’ isn’t the same as selling other Cadbury chocolates Unlike impulse purchase, the gifting business opportunity has a limited window. It thrives on the seasonal demand for sweet gifting during festivals. Cadbury-Celebrations exists to gain the greatest share of this sweet gifting pie.

Diwali the business driver Diwali (festival of lights) and Rakhi (festival for brother-sister love) are the most widely celebrated and the most important from a brand and business point-of-view. Diwali is especially crucial for Cadbury-Celebrations, given that it accounts for 47% of the annual sales for the last five years.

Furthermore, Diwali sales performance is critical to business sentiment for the new year. (Diwali marks the beginning of the Hindu New year).

But this year, consumer & trade sentiments were different with the pandemic in place, making it even more difficult to sustain business during Diwali

The Cadbury-Celebrations business thrives on Indian families between the age of 24-40 who are social and love to celebrate.

These are people for whom Diwali is the biggest festival and gifting is their way of acknowledging relatives and friends.

To make the difference we sought, we had to get people to care about small local businesses. A generic message asking people to support them may yield some result, but we worried it might not be enough.

To evoke empathy and inspire action, we needed to localize and personalize the campaign.

We wanted to use our media investments to promote thousands of small local stores. And thus, we needed to geo-customize our campaign to make it local and personal across India.

We designed an algorithm that would enable us to showcase custom Ads to consumers basis their postal code and shops around them.

Given the magnitude of the intent behind the idea, it threw up many challenges to execute it at scale.

It required creation of hundreds of personalized ads, setting up hundreds of campaigns localized to each pincode, onboarding 2000+ local business owners.

The campaign was launched across Facebook and YouTube simultaneously. These ads were targeted basis pin codes to showcase customize ads to residents of that pin code.

The ad that viewers saw had the local stores names in there are, unique to that pin code in a radius of 2Kms.

By localizing the ads for each pin code and showcasing unique shop names, consumers found the ad familiar and could relate to the shop names in it.

We covered over 250 pin codes across 6 cities, reaching out to 7000+ retailers whose names featured in the ad, making it, not just a Cadbury Ad

Campaign witnessed a remarkable 14.4% uplift in AdRecall and 6% uplift in consideration across platforms. The campaign reached 18mn people and garnered 10Mn video views.

Campaign received an overwhelming reception. Setting new viewership benchmarks (VTR) across platforms for CPG.

It achieved a 40% VTR against a category benchmark of 5% on Facebook i.e., a whopping 8x higher than average.

Highest ever engagement rate @2% against the Mondelez average of 0.3%.

The buzz generated free PR valued at $1.5 million.

Impact soared when influential voices across business, media, fashion, sports, and art shared it organically and urged people to support local businesses.

CAMPAIGN RESTORED TRADE SENTIMENT AND GREW BRAND DISTRIBUTION BY 14%. OVER RAKHI 2020.

Celebrations ADDED 16,000 NEW STORES in traditional trade (small shops).

AVERAGE STOCK PER STORE ALSO INCREASED BY 26%. (i.e., more celebrations gift boxes stocked per.