Creme Egg's 'Hunting Season' was in its third year but with a flat budget, longer Easter season and no new news we needed to reinvent the game. We created a first of its kind Easter Egg Hunt hiding Creme Eggs where you would least expect to find them - in other brands adverts. Solving our client's challenge and simultaneously addressing a key industry problem, we made consumers stop, search and scour ads again. With a multi-media ecosystem and image recognition technology, we built the UK’s biggest Egg Hunt, receiving over 635,000 entries and increasing sales by 45% vs 2018.

Cadbury Creme Egg is an established brand and #1 at Easter with 91% awareness. The product is uniquely only available for five months of the year and is driven by its scarcity. The Creme Egg Hunting Season campaign was in its third year, in 2018 we had seen successful PR engagement with the White Creme egg, but for 2019 we needed to get more consumers involved. We needed to create a hook to satisfy our younger audiences thirst for new news while also attracting and engaging new consumers with the brand. So, we set out to reinvent an existing campaign and going beyond our category norms. Our aim was to create a national frenzy for Easter 2019, in a way no chocolate brand has done before.

Cadbury’s Creme Egg is loved across the nation, but our bullseye audience is the traditionally hard-to-reach 16-34-year-olds, who are moving away from traditional media and have a tendency to skip and block ads. Our insight was that this younger demographic enjoys rich and mutually beneficial brand experiences, so, we built an activation that appealed to this behaviour. We created a rare egg for consumers to hunt for, the White Creme Egg, hiding them both physically in retailers as well as across a range of media platforms and channels.

Our strategy was to harness fans’ love for the product and combine that with scarcity, to drive desirability and urgency to purchase. By hiding a limited number of White Creme Eggs in other brands adverts we created a nation-wide frenzy building on our fans love of the core product and appealing to new users. We hid our eggs in a range of locations, including partnering with 12 leading brands to hide our delicious, gooey goodies in their advertisements. In our media strategy we phased our campaign to initially build awareness and comprehension of the hunt in January, and February we introduced communications that enabled them to directly get involved. This crucial latter stage was seeded across social, digital, outdoor and print ensuring touchpoints across the whole media ecosystem. Ensuring we were communicating urgency we complemented the hunt with branded Live feed countdown of how many eggs were left to find!

We hid eggs in a range of locations and contextually signposted them with Creme Egg messaging. Consumers needed to find them, take a picture and upload to HuntTheWhiteCremeEgg.com. There they could digitally unwrap it to discover whether they had won a rare White Creme Egg – or even win up to £10,000! We had two phases:

1. awareness that hunting season was back

2. engagement in the hunt.

We utilised a range of large format sites in high-footfall locations including the impactful 16-panel strong Waterloo Domination site. In Press, we partnered with Metro and Time Out hiding eggs both within content and brand ads. Inside we indicated whether they were getting ‘warmer’ or ‘colder’ to the page with the egg. To drive urgency, we utilised point-of-sale panels outside retailers, using Live Poster technology to countdown the days left and the number of eggs left to find in that region.

We changed the game of the traditional Easter Egg Hunt, going beyond the chocolate category, with key partners such as a Google, Unilever, LVMH and Lionsgate creating a national frenzy with over 635,000 entries in three months.

We brokered unique partnerships with 12 other advertisers by offering them free ad space in return for hiding our eggs. Our campaign proved beneficial to our partners in return, increasing dwell time on their ads by up to 10 times. Some partners, such as Benefit, went beyond placing our eggs in their ads and embedding them on their own websites – driving over 100,000 entries.

We successfully got consumers to stop skipping and start searching: achieving view through rates of 44% versus the benchmarked 10-15% on YouTube. Our activity increased sales of Creme Egg by 45% vs. 2018, an unprecedented growth rate for a brand that is already #1 at Easter.