Valentine’s Day has become a ‘meetha’ success for us: Anil Vishwanathan, Mondelez India

Viswanathan, Vice President–Marketing, Mondelez India, outlines the company's creative strategies behind the success of Valentine’s Day campaigns Mondelez’s Valentine’s Day campaigns for Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk and 5 Star clearly stood out amidst an equally interesting p

by Team PITCH
Published - March 03, 2022
6 minutes To Read
Valentine’s Day has become a ‘meetha’ success for us: Anil Vishwanathan, Mondelez India

Viswanathan, Vice President–Marketing, Mondelez India, outlines the company's creative strategies behind the success of Valentine’s Day campaigns Mondelez’s Valentine’s Day campaigns for Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk and 5 Star clearly stood out amidst an equally interesting pool of campaigns on the special day of love. Created by Ogilvy and executed by Wavemaker, the campaigns were well-thought and well-executed integration of creativity, technology, and core brand philosophy. Both the campaigns managed to create a lot of buzz with an exciting OOH strategy, with both brands seemingly engaging in banter at prime locations, given both the love-smitten couples and singles a moment to rejoice.

Edited excerpts: What was the creative brief for the agency for the Valentine Day’s campaign? Every year on Valentine’s Day, we find ourselves amongst two sets of people - the love-struck couples who have planned their day minute-by-minute, and then we have the singles who would want to run away from all the mush. At Mondelez India, we wanted to do something different and cater to both sides of the same coin as a part of our Valentine’s Day campaign - the couples as well as the singles. We have been building on the occasion of Valentine’s Day with Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk since 2015, nudging the young hearts to express their love, to try and go beyond the usual and make it special for their partner. Meanwhile, for Cadbury 5 Star, this was the second year where we were leveraging the occasion to make even the singles feel special and included at the back of our larger proposition to ‘Do Nothing’. Our brief was simple on both the brands. For Cadbury Silk, we wanted our young consumers (14-25-year-olds), who are the core consumers of the brand, to come forward and celebrate their love by making their partner blush. We understand that our target audience comprising young individuals and teenagers often celebrate Valentine’s Day in secrecy and we intended to help them create and share custom messages with their special someone. We brought this idea alive by introducing a real-time personalization of augmented reality, enabling consumers to leave custom secret messages for their loved ones by scanning Cadbury ads in TV, newspapers, and hoardings. This was further complemented by the new heart pop pack - a strawberry-flavoured pink heart surrounded by yummy silky-smooth Cadbury Silk chocolate to bring alive the playfulness of sharing secret love messages. For Cadbury 5 Star, building onto the ‘Do Nothing’ proposition, our brief was to take a fun take on the plight of singles, who are time and again asked the most dreaded question - ‘What plans this Valentine’s Day? And how can they get away with this through a creative answer? By infusing humour and quirk, we wanted to integrate the use of the ‘Nothing Coins’ in the most creative manner. How was the ambush between Silk and 5 Star planned? What was your initial reaction to the idea? While Cadbury Silk has been talking to the ones in a relationship, Cadbury 5 Star decided to create an opportunity to truly own the occasion with singles. By doing this, we were able to build contrasting messages between these two brands within our chocolate portfolio to talk to all kinds of lovers during Valentine’s whether single or in a relationship. Our campaign for Cadbury 5 Star worked in tandem with what CDM Silk was planning because it was targeting different cohorts altogether by providing a view that appealed to singles. The campaigns are getting quite a positive response from the audience. How are you feeling about it? Till date, Diwali and Raksha Bandhan have been two of the biggest and most successful occasions for us. However, this year’s overwhelming response sets a new record for Valentine’s Day and the brand teams are very grateful for all the love our campaigns have garnered this year. Apart from the numbers, this year’s Valentine’s Day is extra special as both the contrasting campaigns were tech-led. We leveraged personalised AR technology for CDM Silk for the very first time that allowed consumers to send secret messages. For Cadbury 5 Star, we created special scannable packs giving consumers a chance to win a holiday at Cintacor island aka My Cousin’s Wedding. Taking a step ahead, we even built a faux embassy where they processed the visas to visit ‘My Cousin’s Wedding’. Within the first week of the campaigns going live, over 70,000 people scanned the special Cadbury 5 Star pack and 11 lakh secret messages video cards were created by couples for each other using the Cadbury Silk Heart Pop special pack.  Overall, we were extremely delighted with the response we got. Valentine’s Day has indeed become a ‘meetha’ success for us. Apart from the OOH ambush, what was the effective media plan for the campaign? Cadbury Silk’s #HowFarWillYouGoToMakeThemBlush campaign was further supported by partnerships like that with Spotify where users could create custom playlists with unique hidden voice messages from their respective partners, something only accessible to the two. Whereas Cadbury 5 Star’s Valentine’s Day Alibi campaign also scaled up activations offline through a faux embassy and activated partnerships with various influencers and media platforms. What was the reach and engagement of the digital part of the campaign? Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk
  • 61 Lakh + Secret Messages video cards have been created on the Silk website and other partner platforms like Jio, Paytm etc.
  • As of 24th February, the campaign delivered 163MM reach and 360MM impressions on social
  • On Google, the campaign has garnered 165MM reach, 222 MM impressions and 40 MM+ views
Cadbury 5 Star NothingCoin website metrics
  • Pack scans were reported to be over 66,689
  • 8 million coins mined
  • of minutes of mining – 2.5M hours of mining till date
  • As of 24th Feb, on social, the campaign delivered 190MM reach and 587MM impressions
  • On Google, the campaign has garnered 136MM reach, 177MM impressions and 42Mn + Views.

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