In a nutshell, our brief was to launch Cadbury Caramilk in the UK. This product was the biggest ‘new news’ to hit the category in quite some time. It was a totally new type of chocolate, not just that one you love in a new format or flavour that you see time and time again in confectionery. This felt special, something genuinely exciting to bring to the category.

However, this came with eye-watering sales targets. We needed to make the initial launch of Caramilk the most successful Cadbury NPD launch ever, achieve 15% penetration across the total population, and drive incremental category and portfolio growth by targeting millennials as our bullseye audience.

We needed to do this in a way that was distinct from both the category - which was cluttered with NPDs - and from the rest of the Cadbury portfolio to drive cut-through and excitement among consumers

People love knowing that other people like certain things. It’s why a busy queue outside a coffee shop makes you think ‘that place must be good’.

And our target audience, Millennials, have a particularly low trust in brands. But they do trust the people who bother to write reviews, to the extent that 8 out of 10 millennials never buy anything without first reading a review.

We knew Australians loved Caramilk. It had cult product status over there. So we thought, how could we package this hype and bring it over here to launch Caramilk in the UK with a campaign built entirely around advocacy?

We made the first-ever living, breathing (Aussie on a) billboard. That’s right, we stuck an Aussie to a billboard. Because we knew not everyone would have an Aussie mate or colleague to ask about Caramilk.

Peter from Melbourne and Natasha from Sydney travelled up and down the UK and were stuck to a billboard in city centres, so that anyone who walked past could ask them about their favourite chocolate.

We amplified the billboard in digital spaces through tactical partnerships, owned and earned activity. Influencers visited the billboard in their local cities and asked our Aussie about Caramilk. LADbible took a trip to the billboard to make a social film and wrote articles about it. We created memes that went across the biggest UK meme pages. We ran Instagram Q&As on the Cadbury account so those who couldn’t pass the billboard still had a chance to ask an Aussie.

Caramilk was Cadbury’s most successful new product launch ever.

We achieved 16.3% penetration across the total population. The Grocer awarded it ‘Hottest Launch Of the Year’, dubbing it ‘the biggest product value contributor’.

17% of Caramilk tablet chocolate bar purchase and 14% of single chocolate bar purchases were wholly incremental to the category.

Our content on Ladbible was the 2nd most successful piece of branded content they ran last year. PR drove 224m impressions, journalists loved writing about this cult product hitting shelves in the UK.

Not only did we provide strong sales results and get our new flavour into people’s hands, we managed to successfully get it into the right hands. Caramilk managed to attract over double the amount of millennial purchases compared to core Cadbury Dairy Milk - at 25.4% vs 10.9%.