Not Just a Cadbury Ad

Diwali is a festival of lights and prosperity, with social gifting being an integral part of the festivities. Over the years, Cadbury Celebrations has become synonymous with festivals in India, with Diwali contributing to ~40% of the brand’s annual sales.​

After a lacklustre six months, many marketers and businesses were focusing on Diwali to make up for lost business. While this was dominated by ecommerce players, neighbourhood stores who contribute significantly to Celebrations’ sales didn’t have the support or resources at their disposal to come back. ​

The challenge was to revive Celebrations along with lending support to these local businesses to bounce back, by invoking a sentiment of positivity and generosity among the consumers.

This year warrants acts that signify new beginnings and the potential of goodness in an imperfect world. The Cadbury Celebrations campaign infuses this thought on the back of evoking Generosity. ​

Instead of getting caught up in the cause, crowding among a plethora of other brands by just asking people to imbibe the spirit of Generosity this Diwali, Celebrations wanted to lend a helping hand to the small business by driving footfall into their stores. ​

Considering most of these stores barely even have a digital footprint, we decided to move from the standard conventions of storytelling and introducing People Talking About This (PTAT) metrics, to let consumers See People DOING This. Armed with the power of data and tech to carry the ads, we aimed to inspire people to do what’s right, and to support their local retailers this Diwali.

Introducing “Not Just a Cadbury Ad” – a hyper local personalized ad that captures generosity at a community level featuring local retailers and urging people to remember them while gifting this Diwali. ​

We resorted to the power of tech, dynamic creative optimization and AI to localize the campaign to 300+ pincodes with 2000+ local business owners reaching out to 7000+ retailers whose names featured in the ad, making it, not just a Cadbury Ad. ​

The campaign was launched across Facebook and YouTube simultaneously. These ads were customized based on pin codes featuring the local stores and multiple products showcased in Celebrations ad. Each ad featured shop names from five categories such as Clothing, Electronics, Grocery store, etc. ​

Every location saw an ad which is unique to that pin code in a radius of 2km from the viewer, making the ad viewing experience personal for consumers. By localizing the ads for each pin code and showcasing unique shop names, consumers found the ad familiar and could relate to the shop names in it.