Charlotte Parkes is senior brand manager for Cadbury Easter at Mondelēz International. She oversees Creme Egg, the much-loved chocolate brand worth an estimated £77 million.1
It’s the modern marketer’s chicken-and-egg problem: how do you extend your brand to a diverse range of new formats and audiences when its heritage was built on an analogue, one-size-fits-all approach?
First conceived in TV advertising’s 1980s boom era, Cadbury’s famous Creme Egg slogan — “How do you eat yours?” — acknowledged every consumer was different. Fast-forward four decades, however, and it was time for us to finally harness that variety. We found the answer in AI-powered video.
Searching for the next generation of consumers
Creme Egg enjoys a 76% share of the U.K. “novelty confectionery” segment2, but more and more challenger brands are launching new products at Easter each year, giving shoppers extra chocolate choice in a cost-of-living crunch.
We needed to find the next generation of consumers. People think of Creme Egg as a quirky, young brand, but our core consumers are 45- to 55-year-olds who grew up with our classic TV ads.
We needed to connect with Gen Z and millennials who are less likely to watch TV.
We had already made the switch to digital, with YouTube as our primary reach channel. Since then, it has become one of our top-performing media channels, according to our marketing mix modelling analyses. But we wanted to push that effectiveness even further.
That’s when we discovered YouTube’s AI ad formats. By feeding the right mix of creative assets into the platform, Video Reach Campaigns promise more efficient reach and higher impact without increasing costs. That kind of measurement effectiveness seemed like the answer to our prayers.
AI video ads thrive on variety
The only catch? To take advantage of this multiplier, we would need to give the ads platform an equally diverse creative palette to work from.
AI thrives on variety. The system needed a kit of assets — in different formats and sizes and with different messages — from which to select the right ad for the right person and in the right context, in real-time.
Like many brands, we had been guilty of trying to shoehorn our single, one-size-fits-all TV ad into a digital video for years. It was cheaper and easier.
Those sort of cut-downs wouldn’t cut it for an AI campaign that needed to assemble ad creative from individual components. Instead, we would have to build those components from the ground-up.
At first, that multiplication sounded like extra production cost. But it’s the cutting-down that adds cost. Google’s Creative Works team showed us how, when planned to be platform-specific and format-unique from the outset, rather than repurposed from a TV creative as an after-thought, multi-format campaigns do not have to be cost-prohibitive.
With the fiercely competitive Easter period fast approaching, we worked together with our creative agency VCCP on incubating a series of assets for a made-for-AI ad campaign.
Building the campaign
We began by going back to Creme Egg’s famous slogan. A campaign dependent on variety was a perfect opportunity to finally answer the question that first acknowledged our customers’ diverse ways of enjoying our famous Easter egg: “How do you eat yours?”
We leaned on consumer research to understand people’s unique product preferences. The research illuminated eight different eating styles, four of which we decided to incorporate as a variety of quirky statements in our video creative. The messages resonated with consumer individuality, like “If you eat yours melted on toast, then you thrive in chaos”:
VCCP developed a total of 12 ads in various formats, sizes, and lengths, including purpose-built six-second bumpers, 20-second ads, and portrait spots for YouTube Shorts.
To win and maintain attention, our longer ads used a “heartbeat story arc”, opening the video with a strong visual followed by multiple peaks, unexpected shifts, and brand cues.
The ads closed with a call-to-action driving viewers to an online “How do you eat yours?” personality test, representing a return of the iconic slogan after a 20-year hiatus.
How AI fuels ad effectiveness
Thanks to the ecosystem of content we supplied, the AI — specifically, YouTube Video Reach Campaigns — was able to reach the right viewer at the right time with the right Creme Egg message.
And, although this approach used a wide variety of ad assets, it was no more complex than our previous campaigns. Rather than run separate campaigns for each asset mix, manually adjusting budgets and audiences for each format, we were able to run it all off a single campaign.
YouTube’s AI handles the delivery of ads based on specific business goals, leveraging a greater combination of audience signals — like demographics, time of day, and device — more effectively than a human could. Our goal was to reach as many unique users as possible for our budget and targeting criteria.
We used this approach to maximise our audience, ditching any guesswork, and letting the AI decide which ad creative was shown to whom and how often. This personalised media mix was based on user profiles, taking into account factors such as demographics, interests, and videos watched.
Despite wider economic pressures, we didn’t cut back on budget. In fact, thanks to the higher overall effectiveness from AI, not only did we invest more on production, we also increased our media spend.
Sweet taste of success
2024 was the first time we’d taken this approach, but it won’t be the last for Creme Egg and other Mondēlez brands. We will use the same tactic in 2025 and beyond.
- Some of our metrics improved for the first time in 10 years. Meaning (the main metric we wanted to move the dial on) increased a huge 9%, according to our Metrix Lab 2024 results; salience also increased 0.2%.
- We reached a wider and younger audience, engaged them with compelling content across a multitude of formats, and did it all while maintaining cost-efficiency.
- We tripled our reach year-on-year and 45% of the people we reached watched a video ad to completion.
- We experienced cost efficiencies in our media spend and saw a two-year record low in cost-per-mille (CPM).
It’s crucial to keep putting our brand out there, building that consumer love and emotional resonance for the beloved Creme Egg. It’s also a reminder to build brands despite the myriad of pressures marketers are facing — and AI can certainly help with that.
What this campaign shows is the enormous potential for AI to elevate campaigns, drive reach, and deliver efficiencies. But great human-powered creativity is still king when it comes to effectiveness and impact.
