When you’re only on shelves for a few months each year, generating sales quickly is crucial. We turned this category problem into creative opportunity by inventing a whole new season - Creme Egg Hunting Season - to leverage desirability and scarcity. The campaign has been running since 2017.

To keep people engaged in 2019, we also needed to tackle a bigger industry issue.

We needed to create an ad campaign for a broad audience that is increasingly avoiding ads. 76% of people block ads online or skip traditional TV ads and 90% skip pre-roll video ads.

Convincing people to break New Year’s resolutions and buy an indulgent Easter treat in January is a big ask, especially when Cadbury’s Christmas range has barely left the shelves by that point. So our campaign need to be unexpected and unforgettable in order to deliver the ‘fast start’ sales that the brand required in order to have any hope of meet Creme Egg’s sales targets in just four months.

Our strategy was to turn ad consumption into a highly rewarding experience. We leveraged Creme Egg’s playful positioning as ‘Cadbury’s cheeky younger brother’ to deliver an Easter campaign like no other.

Our integrated approach to strategy and creative created a campaign that was just as integrated in our audience’s world.

Using scarcity to drive desirability had become a truism for Creme Egg, because in reality they’re so easy to find in stores. We needed a way of magnifying the effectiveness of the scarcity principle, without selling fewer products. So we created a new, limited edition product for brand fans to hunt for – the rare White Creme Egg.

Real time social listening showed us where and how consumers’ appetite for engagement occurred. We found a real appetite from people to ‘go hunting’, so creating an egg hunt felt like a route to success. But Creme Egg is known for doing the unexpected.

Creme Egg is enjoyed by a very broad audience in the UK, and research showed that all demographics are increasingly likely to filter out advertising from their media-bombarded lives.

So where was the place this ad-ignoring audience would least expect to find a hidden Creme Egg? Other brands’ ads.

From UXing image recognition functionality to selling the value of partner participation, strategic insight went hand-in-hand with creative and execution to create a truly integrated outcome, internally and externally.

We created a new, limited edition product for brand fans to search for – the rare White Creme Egg.

Then we hid these prizes in a multimedia ‘Easter Egg’ hunt like no other, turning our ad-hating audience of skippers into Creme Egg Hunters who wanted to scour every inch of our partners’ ads!

We partnered with 16 household names such as Unilever, Heinz, Google, Honda and Benefit, and hid our delicious, gooey goodies in their advertising. In short – we turned their ads into our ads. People needed to hunt them down, snap the hidden Creme Eggs and upload them at HuntTheWhiteCremeEgg.com, where they could unwrap the egg they’d found to instantly discover whether they’d won a milk chocolate Creme Egg or a rare White Creme Egg. They also had the chance to win £10,000.

The campaign is still in progress at the time of writing, but so far:

We’ve reached 88% of all UK adults (92% of 16-34s) at least five times each. That reach and frequency has resulted in 15.7 million completed video views across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and a huge 32% VTR rate on our skippable YouTube ads. Not bad considering 90% of people usually skip this type of ad.

This engagement was the first step into a more involving multimedia experience – in total we hid 42 eggs, which were found a massive 761k times! They were hunted down in our partners’ ads, captured on people’s phones and uploaded to our site! This is impressive, considering the depth of engagement this requires from consumers.

Most importantly, sales have increased 37% in volume and 45% in value! All the more significant considering Creme Egg is already the UK’s biggest Easter brand.

Creme Egg is a unique pillar of British confectionary culture, on sale January to Easter each year.

The White Creme Egg is now a highly desirable money-can’t-buy prize that people can win as part of the Hunting Season campaign.

An ‘Easter Egg’, in the digital sense, is an unexpected or hidden feature, usually hidden in software, websites or digital content.

Our multi-media egg hunt included high impact outdoor panels in Waterloo Station, London. Waterloo station is Britain’s busiest railway station, and one of the busiest passenger terminals in Europe, with 94 million people passing through in 2018. This activity drove 14 million impressions.

Other high impact activity included a partnership with TimeOut, Britain’s most popular listings magazine, with a circulation of 312k, and behaviourally targeted messaging on MailOnline, a popular news site in the UK, where we created personalised egg hunts for users, generating 1.39 million impressions.