Company: Cadbury

Agency: Ogilvy

Background: Bourneville is one of the dark bitter chocolates by Cadbury.The Company thought of catering to the niche segment which is fond of the bitter taste and till now bought it only from outside India.

Target Consumer: 19-35years

Challenge: The challenge was to generate ‘buzz’, start conversations, tap social media and go ‘viral’ and to do something in the online space that would perfectly showcase what ‘Not So Sweet’ is all about and people would relate to it. Being not-so-sweet meant being trendy .

Objective: The task was to ignite desire for the brand by creating a fascinating non-sweet chocolate. The brand had a tough job at hand . It had to create a message that was Bournville’s inherent and unique not-sweet taste to establish a cheeky, tongue-in-cheek ‘not so sweet’ personality for the brand. The objective for this campaign was to create an online property around the Not So Sweet. The TVC had already set up the Not So Sweet campaign idea.

Execution: The brand had to create its presence among already present branded and non branded content and appeal to the TG in a fun and engaging manner rather than overt “brand-spiel”.
A proposal was staged in a mall. The reason for doing that was because public proposals are weird, entertaining, silly and most importantly, over sweet, the perfect public demonstration of Not So Sweet.

An essential part of packaging of the proposal as an internet video lay in the precision of the execution. It needed to be realistic so as to make it watchable, sharable and believable.
Theatre actors were used to create realism. Everyone at the mall was as clueless as an online watcher. The brand did not do any branding except the Bournville ‘Not So Sweet’ train. The brand tried enhancing the realism, a single hand held camera that captured the entire thing in a single take – a deliberately ‘amateur’ video.

Media Strategy and Execution: The brand did not want to make it official and the key to make this video go viral lay in it being seen as something that actually happened. So they couldn’t use their official Facebook page or YouTube channel. They could not have promoted it because promotion of any kind makes it seem official. That meant the usual methods: teasers, YouTube mastheads, promoted posts; banner ads etc. could not have been used. To give users an unstopped experience and the facility to seed without obstruction. So a channel was created “crazy1986machan” and uploaded it on this account

Result: The video achieved Rs. 3.25 crores worth of earned media in terms of view count! In less than 4 days they had upwards of 3 million hits on YouTube.
On Facebook as well, the video went absolutely crazy. It was shared separately on a variety of pages that feature funny
It reached South East Asia followed by America in a matter of days.

It was featured on American television on a channel that was covering funny videos (with a special mention of Bourneville), TV in the Philippines and blogs across the world.

Absolutely no money was spent on promotion. The promotion budget of 5 lakh rupees for this campaign was left untouched.

The campaign also saw a whopping 25% growth in value sales over the previous quarter. (As of Dec 2013: Source: AC Nielsen Sales Data).

By Kanika Mehrotra