Situation

The highly competitive confectionary category is already crowded with Salted Caramel options. Cadbury’s new WISPA Gold Salted Caramel needed to be in a class of its own to make an impact.

Brief

Create national hype for new Limited Edition WISPA Gold Salted Caramel.

Objectives

Sell 8 million units in its one-year limited life span.

Cadbury’s new WISPA Gold Salted Caramel was their best gold yet. It was so good, it had to be locked up. To get this gold, you had to crack the vaults that mysteriously appeared in OOH placements across the nation - scan them to turn your phone into a safecracking device, then pick the lock by ear in our immersive sound experience. Listen for each part of the lock to click - too slow and the guards will arrest you. If you can crack the code in time, a new limited edition WISPA Gold Salted Caramel is sent to you in a top-secret envelope. Visual aids made our experience accessible to crooks with impaired hearing. With an overall impact of 13.8 million, it was the biggest heist in the UK history.

Salt transforms caramel, taking it up a level. The edition of salt enhances the caramel of Wispa Gold, making this new limited edition salted caramel flavour Wispa Gold’s finest gold yet. Gold so precious, it needs to be guarded, locked up away from the public eye. And the only way to get a taste is to break in and steal it. We developed an integrated campaign around the proposition ‘salted gold’, driving desirability for a limited edition product. Our campaign spanned our target audience channels - feeding from OOH into digital audio and then into personalised direct mail. It had interactivity and a challenge at its core, playing into the sense of hype around this limited edition product.

To create hype, mysterious Cadbury vaults appeared across the nation in posters, advans and TikTok Ads. Simply scan the QR Code to turn your phone into a safe-cracking machine device. Our immersive sound and visual experience was custom built to give heisters the opportunity to crack the vaults and steal the chocolate. We recreated the ambience of a high-security gold vault with 360 audio, a mesmerisingly suspenseful soundtrack in which the guard could be heard approaching. Listen for the lock to click as it turns amid the other atmospheric sounds and lock in the correct digits. But be quick, or the guards will catch you. The heist lasted for two weeks before the product was widely available in stores.

The vault-cracking experience was so popular, all the WISPA Bars were taken in under 5 minutes of each vault restock. Over 84,000 users gave it a go and the average time spent within the experience was 1 minute 50 seconds - a huge dwell time considering the volume of traffic. The platform-designed Tiktok ads resonated with our younger conquest audience with View Through Rate of 479% supporting a Click Through Rate to the safe cracking experience of 207% vs planned.

The WISPA Platform increased brand penetration by 24.6% resulting in market penetration of 13.8% and a 3.1% increase in RSV. 25.3% more buyers were added to the WISPA brand and WISPA Bars were also purchased 6% more frequently. Rate of sale for WISPA Gold Salted Caramel was 37% faster than WISPA Gold in the first month of launch. Overall, the campaign drove over £2.5m RSV.