Caramilk is a popular candy bar in Canada best known for its enduring ‘Caramilk Secret’ advertising campaign. Its revenue is driven by a small group of loyal users made up mostly of older millennials and Gen Xers. However, to continue to grow, we needed to win back younger consumers. Research told us that younger buyers had memories of eating Caramilk, but the brand had lost relevance in recent years, not surprising given our best-known campaign was almost three decades old! We needed to change that.

Our objective was to reinvigorate Caramilk by increasing brand awareness amongst lapsed, younger users and actively get them to re-engage with the brand.

Cadbury’s Caramilk is an iconic chocolate bar that most Canadians associate with the Caramilk Secret – a popular series of ads launched decades ago that asked how Cadbury got the caramel in the centre of the Caramilk bar. Even though the campaign has been around for almost 40 years, the Secret remains central to the brand’s storytelling.

As a testament to the enduring intrigue around the Caramilk Secret, a quick online audit found that people were still searching online for answers and creating hilarious theories on how Cadbury got the caramel into a Caramilk bar.

We decided we needed to take advantage of this continued online interest in the Secret, and to do so we only needed to prompt the internet with some new fodder to get their conspiratorial wheels turning again.

Our idea was to keep the Caramilk Secret unsolved by flooding the internet with misinformation.

After conducting a robust social listening audit, we realized that internet users loved conspiracies and were still trying to track down the Secret. With additional social media trends analysis, we learned that the conversations about the Secret were happening beyond search.

We decided that re-igniting the Secret was a conspiracy discussion that we could get behind. Our Secret was still being debated online; all we needed to do was fan the flames to start a raging fire of controversy.

Our key occasion we were targeting was the “evening unwind”. We knew the rich flavour of Caramilk was best suited to an evening where you could take your time and savour it. People tend to be relaxing while casually browsing their social feeds in the evening while winding down, giving us the perfect context for our campaign to come to life online.

The campaign ran in 2021 for eight months, from April 7 through December 31. First, we posted promoted social posts on Twitter and out-of-home boards inviting millennials to share their theories on how the caramel got inside the Caramilk bar. When someone replied, we would say, “Yes, that’s right” to make them think they had cracked the Secret. But we told EVERY PERSON WHO REPLIED that their theory was right. In doing so, we flooded the internet with misinformation to further obscure our Secret.

Later, we posted our favourite theories to our social channels as promoted posts. The content included their written theory, a visual we created and a confirmation that they had the right answer. We again flooded the internet with misinformation and made it impossible for anyone to tell the truth from internet conspiracy. In other words, we playfully made sure our Secret remained just... a secret.

Twitter named us one of the most successful Twitter campaigns in history. We crushed campaign awareness benchmarks in the CPG space by 266%, and our ad recall was 300% above CPG norms. After being exposed just once to our video posts on Twitter, 49% of users recalled seeing it and 65% of campaign awareness at the end of the campaign. We surpassed CPG benchmarks by 200%, and we saw that intent turn up in sales.

We were able to grow sales when the campaign was in market, with overall sales lift of 1% on the #1 Caramilk format of Singles. The candy bar and chocolate market in Canada is $3.4B; given the maturity of the brand, a 1% increase supported Caramilk 50g Singles to maintain its position as the #3 Chocolate Singles bar in Canada by POS data.