Cadbury were launching a new bar, a limited edition Twirl Caramel. Twirl was already a firm favourite. And we knew from research that caramel was a very popular flavour. So, we decided to try to limit the hype around it, so the general population wouldn’t be disappointed at missing out on a bar that was going to be very limited edition. Instead of using popular traditional media, we used the most unpopular, obscure media we could find. The most hard-to-find, least-visited, invisible media across every touchpoint, from print to digital. We needed the opposite of a best practice media plan.

People like Twirl. And people like caramel. So rather than raise awareness of what the new product was, we created a campaign based on how limited this new product would be. We knew this sense of limitedness would create massive FOMO, particularly as we continuously talked about controlling the hype so as not to tell too many people about this limited edition chocolate bar. Instead of spreading the word, we used the UK’s most unused media, from posters on the least-populated island, to banners on the least-visited websites. However, the campaign was a total disaster. Twirl Caramel Limited Edition completely sold out and became the UK’s best-selling new single chocolate bar of 2022. Which was great for Cadbury, just a total failure on our part to #ControlTheHype

Launch the new Limited Edition Twirl Caramel bar - a tough job considering that the market is currently saturated with new ingredients, new flavours and new limited editions. It also needed to be in a class of its own with the business ambition being to make the bar the biggest selling adult single in 2022. In addition, Twirl was popular amongst an older generation, but we needed to engage a younger audience. So we decided to create a social-first campaign based around a Twitter livestream that challenged the social media-conscious audience to get their hands on a bar. By making Twitter central to the idea, we greatly skewed the interaction of the campaign to predominantly 18-24 year olds.

To control the hype, we put out hard-to-find ads, using the UK’s most unused media. An ad on a church noticeboard, followed by an outdoor ad on the UK’s least-populated island, an ad at the UK’s least-used train station, press ads in the UK’s least-read publications, banner ads on the internet’s least-visited websites. We told a couple of people about it on MySpace. We even paged the 2 people who still used pagers. On Twitter, we created the world’s first dark tweet. A secret tweet that you could only find if you scanned a hidden ad. Surely this would control the hype? No. Twitter just wanted more. So we challenged people on a Twitter livestream to find more hidden ads. Nearly 500,000 people turned up. We trended at #1 for three hours. Twirl Caramel became the best-selling chocolate bar in the UK, despite our best efforts to #ControlTheHype

Despite our best efforts to control the hype, the launch of the Twirl Caramel Limited Edition bar exploded. It was the UK’s best-selling new single chocolate bar of 2022. It added £1.5m RSV to the chocolate singles category. The Twirl brand grew overall by 2.6%. During our livestream, over half a million people joined. Resulting in us trending at #1 in the UK for three hours. We even pushed #PlatinumJubilee to number 2 on the first day of the platinum jubilee celebrations. Between press, outdoor and online, we earned over 90 million impressions. Oh, and we sold out of every single bar.