Cadbury Celebrations brand is a festive chocolate box from Cadbury in India. But unlike chocolates, selling a gift box of chocolates isn’t the same. As gifting is a limited window opportunity and thrives on the seasonal demand, we exist to gain share from this gifting demand with Diwali as its biggest opportunity.

But in a pandemic-struck year, how could Cadbury make Celebrations matter during Diwali and prevent its seasonal gifting business from tanking?

Chocolate being 'non-essential' had hit rock bottom during the pandemic. Cadbury was fighting a herculean recovery task from a -50% decline.

Consumer sentiment was at its lowest weeks before Diwali due to fall in household income and even the trade sentiment was at its all-time low.

Given the situation, the objective to get people to think of gifting when they didn’t even want to celebrate.

And while doing so, finding a way to salvage our business.

The pandemic had isolated and distanced people. Lockdown shortage, pay-cuts,

job losses made people look out for themselves. Our brand purpose of ‘inspiring generosity’ was hopelessly out of sync with these times leaving no role for gifting in the environment.

Consumer research, however, also showed that the pandemic had made many people aware of how much they missed connecting with others. Their own suffering had made them more empathetic.

We realised there were many small shops and businesses that sold our products and were badly hit. Social distancing had increased online shopping and hit their sales.

We wanted to find a way to help them too while helping ourselves. So instead of encouraging people to buy celebrations to gift, we encouraged them to buy from small local shops.

We used our ad budgets and gave small businesses a platform where they had none, helping them survive these times.

For our communication to matter, we had to get people to care about these small 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 would need to personalise the campaign.

Show them who in their neighborhood they could help by doing their Diwali shopping from.

Making our idea actionable took more than one could imagine. First it had to work as a stand-alone Diwali ad. Then it needed us to show a variety of gifts being shared and not just Cadbury Celebrations. Lastly, it had to tag the names of local shops from where these gifts have been sourced. And, most importantly, it needed to show names of local shops of that catchment area where it got served. All of this needed to happen automatically, smoothly, and at scale.

We mobilized on-ground sales teams to onboard 7-8 small shop owners in each postal code. We then ran a few pilots to check the responsiveness of the AI-enabled ad on YouTube. Using postal code-based data, we custom-designed different versions of the same ad which was geo-targeted across 260+ pin codes. Our viewers based on their location and their postal codes saw a version of our Diwali ad which featured the names of the stores around them. We could do this by building a bank of the stores across 260+ postal codes and an algorithm that custom created a specific ad for each viewer.

We seeded the ad along with the explainer video through the dark social to trigger a chain reaction to compliment the hyper-targeting reach through YouTube and Facebook.

We continued to reach out to the larger universe with a generic edit to give scale to the category.

Achieved a 40% View Through Rate (benchmark of 5%) on Facebook and YouTube a showcase of how many people saw our ad.

Earned an overwhelming $1.5 million worth of free PR as the case video was shared across dark social. Adding to it, engagement soared and spread even more as influential voices organically supported the gesture.

More stores, more boxes.

We added 16000 more stores in traditional trade. Additionally, stocking of our boxes per store increased by 26%. This addition alone gave us an incremental seasonal sale of USD 3.6 million.

Against an estimated fall of 30%, we recorded a 2.2% growth. That meant an uplift of 32.2%. The highest surge of sales in our history.

Small shops that contributed 60% to our total Diwali sales increased by 14%. Taking share from small shops to 74%.

Additionally, even E-comm grew 100%; from 4% business share to 8%.