The majority of advertising is either not noticed, or actively ignored. The Hunt for the White Creme Egg tackled this industry challenge head-on.

In a first-of-its-kind collaboration with 16 partners, we hid coveted White Creme Eggs in other brands’ ads. We got the nation to stop skipping and start searching as they rewound, re-watched and scoured every square inch of them.

This drove total brand sales up by a massive 45% year on year.

Demonstrating the true scope and scale of this integrated, participatory, multi-brand partnership would be impossible in any other category.

When you’re only on shelves for a few months of the year, generating sales quickly is crucial. Our Creme Egg Hunting Season campaign addresses this challenge. It has been running since 2017, but to keep people engaged in 2019, we also needed to tackle a bigger industry issue.

We needed to create an ad campaign for an audience that is increasingly avoiding ads.

People are moving away from traditional media. A recent study found 76% of people block ads online or skip traditional TV ads and 90% skip pre-roll video ads.

We needed to drive desirability and, crucially, urgency to purchase, so the brand could hit its sales targets during this short period of time. In order to do this, our communications objectives were to drive reach and positive brand engagement among our target audience, and do that in a way that was as integrated as our audience’s media worlds.

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

Then, in a unique series of partnerships, we worked with other advertisers to create the ultimate ‘Easter eggs’. We hid our super sought after eggs in other brands’ ads – getting the nation to stop skipping and start hunting for them!

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.

Creme Egg is enjoyed by a very broad audience in the UK, but our bullseye target market is 16-34 years old. This audience are driven by newness, but the product itself remains the same from year to year, so the onus is on marketing to create sales-driving salience.

This audience are more likely than any other to filter out advertising from their media-bombarded lives, so our strategy was to turn ad consumption into a highly rewarding experience. This enabled us to harness fans’ love for the product and combine that with scarcity, to drive desirability and, crucially, urgency to purchase.

The Hunt for the White Creme Egg magnifies the effectiveness of the scarcity principle, without actually selling fewer eggs. By hiding a limited number of White Eggs in other brands’ ads, we created a nationwide frenzy that capitalised on people’s love for the product, driving sales of the core range.

Our campaign ran from 1st Jan to 21st April 2019.

Clues released and promoted on social media directed people to the eggs we’d hidden in other brands’ on and offline ads, which we implemented by working very closely with multiple advertisers and their agency partners to ‘hack’ their advertising.

Once people found a hidden egg, Creme Egg branded signposting directed them to our campaign hub, HuntTheWhiteCremeEgg.com. On the website, built-in image recognition technology meant that Creme Egg Hunters could easily upload a screengrab or photo of the egg they’d found and instantly ‘unwrap’ it to see if it was white chocolate or milk chocolate. All without leaving their browser.

Across the season we hid eggs in billboards, press ads, YouTube videos, TV ads, scial content, websites, in stores and more. We collaborated with 16 partner brands in order to make the campaign happen.

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.