M&M’s, the world’s largest chocolate brand, was experiencing an identity crisis. People didn’t think of M&M’s as chocolate. And it showed in the sales of the flagship product, the milk chocolate bag. It was time to shake things up. We needed to put the chocolate back in colourful chocolate fun. We listened. Consumers associated the brown M&M’s most with chocolate. Also, everyone loved our M&M’s characters, and every colour in the bag had a character except brown—prompting consumers to ask for a brown character.We saw the opportunity to bring the level of bigness we needed to drive our chocolate message by leveraging our two biggest brand assets – the brown M&M’s and our characters – to create Ms. Brown.We used a mix of social media, digital, print and TV to build a holistic picture of her personality and allow consumers to engage with the character both broadly and personally.

The brown M&M was often viewed as the least fun, but it was perceived to be the most chocolaty; it was the original.

Great care was taken in developing Ms. Brown’s personality and story. As the original, Ms. Brown was the brains behind the operation. Highly intelligent and witty, Ms. Brown was not your average chocolate.

We launched a fully integrated campaign to introduce the new character to consumers. Digital banners, homepage takeovers, print, and radio integrations drove consumers to a like-gated Facebook page with links to Ms. Brown’s Pandora playlist and her Twitter feed – where consumers could get clues about her personality before her big reveal on the Super Bowl.

People could then watch the spot on the YouTube brand channel, where consumers were also encouraged to check out the Facebook page for a live Q&A as well as her debut in NASCAR at the Daytona 500.

We got people talking.

Facebook and Twitter engagement was up over 350% within weeks of launch.

The spot has over 32m YouTube views. It scored in the top five of nearly every Super Bowl ad poll, was number one in YouTube’s Super Bowl ad blitz and was the most liked, most engaging and most talked-about spot of the night. The spot is still one of the top 20 most shared videos globally.And sales are through the roof. We are up 11% overall, more than twice the category growth, with milk chocolate sales alone up 7.9%.

Chocolate is back.