Mobile marketing
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7feb
Cadbury: Exploiting the nexus between mobile and social marketing
Posted by Christopher Hosford
Mobile marketing is more than coming into its own, in particular when linked to a dynamic social media campaign. I had occasion recently to interview Caroline Davison, managing partner with U.K. agency Elvis Communications, about a gangbusters mobile campaign on behalf of confectionary company Cadbury centered on Snapchat and its new sponsored lens technology.
Chris: Caroline, tell us more about the campaign on behalf of Cadbury. What were its goals?
Caroline: We created one of the most phenomenally successful Snapchat lenses the platform has ever seen. In 2016, we needed to put product love at the heart of our Creme Egg campaign. In particular, we needed to encourage our core 16-34 year old target audience to spend more time with us as a brand to ensure we remain relevant.
Cadbury is a brand that buys into Byron Sharp’s “Laws of Growth” — two key principles of this seminal piece of research are that brands grow by increasing their penetration, and that in order to do this, they must increase mental (and physical) availability. Snapchat offered the perfect platform to engage this audience at scale, while staying true to our brand’s cheeky tone of voice.
Chris: What were the elements of Cadbury’s Snapchat mobile campaign?
Caroline: We created the confectionary category’s first ever sponsored Snapchat lens that gave chocolate lovers the opportunity to give their selfies an animated Creme Egg twist. Users playing with the lens saw their eyes turn into Creme Eggs and Creme Egg hearts poured out of their mouth when they opened wide. Then, an explosion of Creme Egg “goo” runs down their screen when the hearts hit the front of the user’s phone.
Chris: What was the appeal of Snapchat to your Cadbury campaign?
Caroline: Brands were well established within the “Discover” section of the app. But the opportunity to create and promote branded lenses was a new and exciting development on the platform. No confectionary manufacturer in the U.K. had capitalized on this. In fact very few brands at all had explored the possibility of lenses as a new in-app advertising format at this point.
This gave us a unique opportunity: a new way to engage our audience at scale, a new way to leverage the power of consumer sharing, and a new way to communicate the cheeky irreverence of our brand.
Chris: What kind of ROI did the campaign produce?
Caroline: The lens ran for 24 hours on the channel priming people for Creme Egg’s pre-Easter sales push. On that one day, we reached half of all people on Snapchat in the U.K. (and 26% of our whole target audience) and saw 14.4 million uses of the lens. People interacted for an average of 24 seconds, significantly more than the 18-second average dwell time.
Our in-app advertising objectives were focused on reach among our target audience, playing and using the lens, and spending time engaging with the branded experience we create. This was a big ask. We weren’t just hoping for consumers to watch our ad. We wanted them to literally put themselves into it, and share it with their friends!