How Cadbury turned "Glass and a Half in Everyone" into one of the most effective campaign ideas in the world

0:04Hello gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now in this episode we talk about one of my all time favourite brands Cadbury. Now, not just one of my favourite brands, they're also one of the best performers on the System 1 database, consistently knocking it out of the park with five-star work. So in this episode, to find out more about it, I'm joined by David Boscoen from VCCP, also known as Bosco, as you'll discover as you listen back to the podcast, and Guy Ferreira, who's recently joined, who brings an outside perspective on what it means to take over an iconic brand with 200 years of heritage.

0:35There's so much in this episode. I know you're going to love it. Here it is. Welcome to you both. Thank you for having us. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Absolute pleasure. Well, let's do some introductions so the audience knows who we're talking to. So Guy, you're new. So maybe we'll start with you and then we'll come to Bosco and find out a bit about you as well. So Guy, tell us how you got to this place. Yeah, so I have been in this role for the past five months. Prior to that, I spent 17 years in Unilever across different roles, mostly global roles in Brazil, in Asia, in Europe. before I moved to Danone, where I spent the last five to six years before getting into this role.

1:12But I would say that 90 % of my career has been managing global brands, mostly in global teams. That's basically where my passion is. But this challenge is very different to the challenges I had before. In many of the categories and brands that I have managed before, the challenge was turning around, changing the direction because the previous direction wasn't working. and it is the first time that I have an opportunity to work on a brand where all measures are working well. Business is doing well, equity is doing well, getting external accolades from all agents in the industry. So it's a different challenge for me because it's not about changing things in a dramatic way, but how do we take it to the next level?

1:55How we carry the brand heritage and the amazing work that has been done so far forward. So I think it's much harder. It's much harder working with a team that is being very successful and then looking for the areas where we can improve and do better. And I think I'm right in saying you're the first non-commonwealth person as well to be running the brand. How does it feel to come and take over a much-loved British icon? Yes, it is hard. English is not my native language. which is the native language of the brand in most countries where we operate. But I think it has to do with the culture as well.

2:34You know, my first taste of chocolate is not Cabaret. There are many chocolate brands in Brazil that developed a taste in myself. But I think, on the other hand, it's also good because I don't have any prejudice or preconceived idea of what a brand is. And I come with that naivete and that fresh perspective that I think can be very helpful in this new stage of the brand where we're exploring uncharted territories. I am not being somehow influenced and biased by the past. At the other hand, I need to rely on people like Bosco and everyone that has been on the brand so far so I don't go too far away.

3:11And especially from the DNA of the brand, that is pretty important because the brand has been successful because it has managed to have the ability of carrying that DNA and expressing that DNA throughout history in a very beautiful way. Well, you've got some good friends, of course, who can help you in the journey. So Bosco, let's bring you in here and tell us a bit about you and how you ended up here. I have been in the industry for a long time. It used to be called the advertising industry when I joined it in the late 80s. I think it's probably broadened out into the communications industry now as digital has come in, et cetera.

3:43So been through a number of big agencies, some small ones, and had been fortunate enough to work on big brands, big household names, some of them. I started on Heinz, Heinz Bait Bean. which was just the beginning of the most brilliant learning curve really on how to do fmcg worked on the likes of coca-cola and nestle and all sorts of brands so and then joined vccp in 2010 and pitched for cadbury in 2017 and that's when we kind of engaged with cadbury for the first time mondelez and yeah it's been a it's been a great relationship and well and also well i should congratulate both of you because based on system one data you've done exceptional work over that time in fact i was looking at the data just a bit earlier 17 five-star ads i'm going to go and check actually because i i don't know any other advertiser with so many five stars i think we need a reward for the you know the biggest number of five stars but that's very impressive and very consistently so as well over last year so last year i think garage was the number one ad on system one database bit outside of Christmas.

4:47There was a proliferation of 5.9s at Christmas, but this year already also another 5.9, which is great. So you're clearly doing something right. So I want to find out what you're doing right and why. Take us back to where your positioning came from as well. I'd love to find out a bit more about that, you know, going back to 2017. Cabri called us in in 2017. It was probably 10 years since Guerrilla. But then I think after that, the brand hit rockier ground as the the joy campaign uh embedded itself in all the advertising around the world and it just really didn't find a way of expressing the brand in the most coherent way and if you looked at the stats and the databases over the previous five years 2012 to 2017 you would see that the brand was losing its connection with consumers with the nation and not just in this nation, but also in Australia and in more developing markets like India, it wasn't as strong.

5:47The growth wasn't as strong as it had been in previous years. So we had to try and understand that. One of the things that was clear was that it was sitting in joy. It was sitting in the joy category. And whereas as a need state, whereas it was clear that Cadbury was far more in the sense of belonging and comfort space, and that's how consumers put them. So we really needed to kind of get under the skin of what can we say about this brand that really can communicate the brand in the right way within this space. So we went to Bourneville. We took the briefing. And that really is just an experience in itself.

6:25Sitting in the boardroom at Bourneville, having the Cadbury family over 200 years, looking down on you. You had a sense of responsibility, a sense of really feeling like you had to deliver for these people and for the brand. And especially as we're sitting in Bourneville, which really was the kind of the home of Cadbury's extraordinary Quaker philanthropy, in which they took people out of the smog of Birmingham and felt that they had to give their workers a quality of life that they deserved. So they took them out to the River Bourne, where they created Bourneville, and gave them schools, gave them hospitals, gave them cricket pitches.

7:04And, you know, John Cadbury famously said, every person should be able to grow a rose in their garden. And so this sort of sense of looking after people, the generosity of spirit of wanting to look after people was extraordinary. And it started there. And then, of course, it went through, I don't know if you would have known, that the bank origins of the bank holiday, it's called a bank holiday, of course, because that was only for banks. And Cadbury felt that that was absolutely wrong and it should be democratized across everybody for all workers and so they they campaigned for the bank holidays to be a national holiday for everyone and of course through to the wars and can bring making sure that products got the front line so you we had an extraordinary sense of the kind of the generosity of spirit of the brand wanting to sort of democratize generosity and be good to all people so that was a kind of major a starting point for us.

7:57Of course, what we were looking at doing at the time was trying to deliver a new campaign for Cabri Dairy Milk, which is, of course, is the lead brand for Cabri, is the kind of the heartland of the brand. And one of the reasons why we had to do that was because that had been becoming eroded as there had been too much spotlight put on probably the innovation around that core brand. So kind of ingredient extensions, generating kind of short term lifts in sales. And whilst the brand itself and the equity of the brand itself was decreasing. So we said we needed to create a brand for dairy milk. We went back to the origins of dairy milk in 1904.

8:36And of course, they had the glass and a half of milk being poured in, which seemed like the ultimate symbol of the kind of representing the generous spirit of John Cabry. So we said that should be the recognized base of everything we do. It's an extremely well-known asset. around the world in terms of mental availability. And if that can represent the kind of the spirit of Cadbury, that's what we should be driving for. But of course, and then when you get into the strategy and you get into the communications, the one thing you realize very quickly is talking about your generous self is in itself not that generous.

9:14So you needed to communicate how you felt about the world and your outlook on the world in a different way. And so we took the camera off ourselves and we turned it round. We basically said we need to put it focus on consumers and make sure and we can represent the extraordinary generosity in people that it does exist every day and bring that to life. And so that's what we did. And we've got a fantastic executive credit director called Darren Bales, who really set the pace of it and said, look, we need to represent generosity in the smallest way, the smallest, most real, most powerful way. of course there is a lot of very loud philanthropic charity generosity writing checks for a lot of money which very often gets seen on tv or shown and talked about we weren't talking about this sort of generosity we're talking about the hidden generosity the the the unknown generosity that is actually happening every day underneath our noses but we don't really necessarily focus on and so we called it small big small acts of generosity with very big emotional power so we started there and and what Daz said was we need to be quiet our work needs to be as quiet as we can make it because on the one hand the the category was this sort of crazed sugar rush very sort of self-centered kind of communication very loud which we wanted to break away from there's no point sitting within that kind of communication.

10:46And at the same time, the whole industry, all advertising seemed to be getting louder and louder. And yet this generosity, it seemed like this hidden generosity seemed like a very, very quiet, understated thing to do. So we decided that the cut through of our work had to be through quietness, make people sit up and watch and listen as the TV set suddenly went quiet after a loud outbreak and people started watching this kind of narrative play out that felt like it was a narrative. It could have been an everyday narrative in terms of the type of storyline it was, but it felt like in that 30 seconds or that 60 seconds, it was like a narrative cut out of a film.

11:27It was like you had just broken into something. And that's what we did. And we amplified these very, very small acts of generosity. And fortunately it worked. And we said, that is the glass and a half in everyone that Cadbury believes exists in everyone. Yeah, enormously powerful. I mean, Gears is very right-brained, isn't it? And I think in marketing, so much is very left-brained. It's promotional, it's shouty, as he talks about. It's noisy, it's performance, it's call to action, that kind of thing. The juxtaposition here is quite dramatic, isn't it? Even not using music, I think, is quite powerful, isn't it?

12:02Very, very right-brained in the way the stories are told. I guess you're seeing it quite new, aren't you, and looking it back, but yeah, what's your take? Yes, we were talking about that before, and it's a conversation that I have very often with the agency, with my team internally, and throughout my career as well. Because I joined this profession in the first place because of the craft aspect of it. But somehow what you learn in school and what you learn in trainings is basically ways in which you can manufacture success. And then you have theories and tools that help you assemble things in such a way that's supposed to lead you to success.

12:43And one of the reasons why I actually took this job in the first place is the pride and the inspiration that the work had on me from outside the company. And then now that I'm inside the kitchen doing the work is how everyone is really passionate about the craft aspect. of this profession. Of course, we test things. There are a number of different sophisticated tools that we use to get our work to the next level. But I think 90 % of the time in the conversations that we have, we have to do with the craft. And it's something that is very, very hard to describe. And then every single process is different, therefore.

13:25But I think the understanding and the clarity that we have on what the brand stands for is basically what Bosco was describing. before, which is this value of generosity that was there on the beginning and that we managed to express throughout our history, depending on the context. And how do you therefore express those values in a very genuine way is basically old-fashioned storytelling. So the stories we tell, they're not manufactured. And very often, I think when we pull out a brief, the stories that come back, they're personal stories from someone from the team or someone from the creative from the creative team so they they haven't been put together in such a way to respond to the brief in artificial manner but they are truly authentic human stories and that's what i find very powerful about the work they come from a from a place on authenticity because they they are real real stories i'd love to ask you both actually if you've got a favorite i know this is a horrible thing to ask given that But do you have a favorite that you're particularly proud of?

14:32I probably have a few favorites, actually. One can naturally think that mum's birthday is a favorite because it was the start of it all. And actually, just going back to what he was saying, the story of mum's birthday and how the precision of understanding consumer response. And I think for me, this is one of the great learning curves is always when you're writing, knowing what reaction you're trying to generate in people, in the viewer. and you write and you pace accordingly. And it was very interesting because when mum's birthday, the script was first written, she was in the store and she says, can I have a bar of chocolate, please?

15:08And she says, it's for my mum's birthday. And then she goes out and gives the chocolate to her mum and actually in discussion with the team, Chris and Johnny and Frédéric Planchon, the director, they were talking about the pacing and said, really, wouldn't it be great if the birthday is revealed at the end? It's like the denouement. So all she says is it's for my mum in the shop. And so it was rewritten accordingly because it was going to make the ending more powerful and more meaningful. So those touches are throughout everything. The types of quality of expression, and I was talking earlier about bus.

15:46It's one of my favorite ones, actually, which is just such a simple story of a kid on the bus going home, fidgeting like he would be, and mother on the phone and fidgeting with a bar of chocolate he's not allowed to eat and then sees this girl teenager crying. So he looks at her and of course as a kid they're instinctive and so they just want to help. That's their instinctive generosity. Adults tend to stand back a bit. So the little kid offers some chocolate, some Cadbury dairy milk to this teenager to which if you went into i think kind of traditional advertising the teenager would have taken the chocolate thank you would have cheered up a little bit and smiled right and at the end the film would have finished with as a glass and a half and everyone but that wouldn't have been the authentic way of doing it it wouldn't have been the real way of doing it which is why we said no no the teenager needs to reject it turn it down she's too upset too unhappy to turn it down so they turns it down and the kid accepts that of course because they're kids with grace and then looks at and has this wonderful sort of shrug with the girl right and which breaks a smile in her and she's to say i am what can i do sort of thing and for me those those tiny moments just gold dust and make all of this extremely powerful so and of course the when the boy says to his father in speakerphone you know i really think you're clever dad all you've just Scott is a camera on the father's face.

17:18And you can see his responses and his visceral emotion, right? As his son is saying that for the sort of first time. So it is very interesting because it is a campaign that demands great acting. And I'm not sure if there are many campaigns out there that absolutely demand very, very high class quality acting. That's such a good point, isn't it? The characters are so key. I mean, probably I can't quite decide. For me, the favourite would be either Garage, because there's a dad with two girls, you know, and they're teenagers. They're not that much younger probably than the girl in the ad. And it's the twist where you realise he's the dad.

17:59Because up to that point, you're going, it's a bit weird. It's late at night. This guy's walking in. She's on her own. You know what I mean? And there's that slight sense of not quite sure what's happening here. And the moment you get that twist, oh, it just hits you. But I think that's interesting. But it's actually the next thing that goes on once you've seen it once. Because, of course, that's the first time you've seen it. And you say, well, who is this strange guy? And it obviously comes out to her dad. But, of course, the second time you see it, you know that. So the quality, I think, is that the second time you see it, there's still, why is he going out there?

18:36Why has he fallen out? Has he fallen out? obviously they've had a you know a dispute between father and daughter and he's gone to make up and of course there is in lies the generosity but the kind of the backstory behind it is in everyone else's heads in every parent's head that knows that it's a natural thing to fall out and everyone has their own reasons so that's the power i think of the second viewing the third viewing and the fourth viewing is it's an interesting point i hadn't thought about that but but you're leaving a little bit for the audience to fill in aren't you which is part of the cleverness of it that you kind of have to interpret a bit what might be going on yeah that's fascinating i mean the other one that got me totally was you know 200 years with the unicorn you know where she's in she's in the shop and then he she puts you know she pet tries to pay with her little unicorn or whatever and he gives the change back i just think oh it's back to what you're saying tiny details aren't they but it's the silence it all hangs on those details doesn't it it's the silence as the shopkeeper is just looking at her and all you're seeing is putting her little pennies, plastic pennies out there, going through it, putting a bracelet out there, then eventually getting to her uniform and it's all in silence, you know, and it's just left there.

19:47It's really very powerful. And the nostalgia I think is, I mean, you know, we all remember when we were kids, it was quite a brave thing when you went on your own to the store and the person in the store was quite a scary you know, often sort of thing and you'd save up your money and you know save up to buy something so it it very much taps into human truth doesn't it and that's why i think you've also done well with generations you know from you know from you know very young to very old and and the relationships we have is is enormously powerful the entire campaign is about relationships of course it's about this type of generosity this empathy bringing people closer and we all recognize them and we all recognize it in everyday life.

20:27In fact, one of the things we said when we were presenting the campaign originally, and we were talking to the clients, we said, you know, if you're a parent, one of the greatest values you could ever have and want to have and see in your child is the value of generosity, being a generous spirit. If you saw your child as being some mean, kind of less ungenerous thing, it's that that's that's that's hard so it's very very powerful as a value to hold and one that every parent can resonate with and every teenager can resonate with their friends yeah and go you know do they hold this do they what sort of spirit have they got totally totally good point i mean you said something on a webinar that we did recently about which the concept i loved which is the idea of compound creativity and and one of the things that i observe looking in at some of of work you've done over the last few years is how it's built on itself and how you've been able to play with the idea build on the idea it feels familiar you know i can kind of spot a cabriade and i kind of i'm now looking for the little details of that sort of thing but how important is the is the consistency to the success do you think i think that consistency has been super super important in a number of different ways i think first is you have the same idea that It is expressed in different ways, but always consistent to the idea.

21:47And there are certain codes in the stories that we tell that remain the same. But there's always an element of freshness that is basically either the insight, the characters, the setting, the story itself that is different. From a media perspective, we have been doing some experiments in countries like Australia where the advertising is so good that it doesn't wear out. So you can actually rotate. You can start with add A and then go to B, go back to A, go to C, go back to A. And by doing that, you are creating that compound effect that yields a better result than just doing that in a linear way and moving from one copy to the other just because we want to do new stuff.

22:26And I think there's something for me that is also equally important is how we are tuned into culture as well. And I think to Bosco's point, the idea of generosity is super universal, is a universal human value, but we managed to capture that across age groups, ethnicities, social backgrounds, and so on. And I think it's also compounds on that way as well, because we are not only speaking to a certain group of people. We are talking to everyone because that insight is universal. But we are also expressing that in all the walks of life in a certain society. So I think in that way, every time we bring a story, it resonates to a smaller group of people, but to everyone to which that value is important.

23:15Yeah. I mean, it's amazing listening to you, Bosco, talk about the journey you've been on and the nuance and the craft, that sort of thing. But I wonder, Guy, what it's like when you're still fairly new. How does the business see this from, I guess, from the client side? I mean, obviously, it looks very successful on the outside and it's very compelling as you tell the story. Does it have a lot of commitment inside Mondelez? definitely because from a business perspective it has been effective but you know when I hear the stories and the backstories on how it has happened it wasn't very easy in the beginning to sell and I think the agency has played a very important role in helping us selling the work internally because it's quite unconventional work for the category as Bosco explained it's a very loud category, sugar rush, colorful, bright, and loud.

24:06And the work is the opposite of that. You know, if you test the work in certain methodologies, we're going to say, oh, it's quite passive, you know, it's not an active type of advertising. And then there are some red lights that sort of light up when you see that kind of reaction or that kind of result. I think there was a leap of faith in the organization that said, you know what, the model that we have up until this moment in time hasn't worked. This is connected with our DNA. Let's give it a try because we have been trying for the last 10 years. After Gorilla, there were a few successes, but after that it was very hard to follow up.

24:44So there was a leap of faith, and I really admire that in the leaders of Mona Lisa, the ability they have to take on ideas that are completely unconventional. It worked in the beginning, but took us a while as well for the model to get going. Today, I think there's still question marks and things that we, of course, we have to improve. But if it weren't for a few courageous leaders, you know, the brand leader then was Ben Wicks, who is now the VP of Australia, you know, driving that with the agency, some other courageous leaders inside as well, I think it wouldn't have happened. But I think there's something as well that I was even discussing that with Bosco beforehand, which is the quality of the relationships that people have also inside the organization.

25:30The work wasn't sold in a mechanical way, in the most traditional way. You know, let's go to the boardroom, let's have the agency presenting, let's have 20 people around the table judging the work. I think 90 % of the selling was about the relationship that Ben at that time had with the agency and then connecting a one-on-one and getting people on board little by little. So there was a buildup in that sense as well. So I think that's also very important. I mean, I think you've hit on something. I mean, I talk to a lot of CMOs and a lot of crave agencies as well. And one of the biggest challenges at the moment is budgets are being cut.

26:05I mean, the Gartner survey says that basically we're down to the lowest level of marketing spend as a percentage of revenue that we've been on since COVID. In fact, also since before COVID. So we're almost at COVID levels of investment, which is an incredible sort of pressure. Again, talking to CMOs as well, ask them what the number one issue they've got. And the number one issue that comes back consistently is the ability to argue and make the case for brand investment at the moment. So there's a real pressure. So I'm fascinated to understand how, you know, and often one of the tensions I've been in, you know, in kind of creative partnerships is having some amazing ideas and going, I've now got to get a business aligned to this.

26:40And so any advice you've got, you know, from, I guess, current job or previous job and again, from an agency point of view about how you get an organisation on board? This idea of compound creativity is very, very important because it's based on having a North Star. And if you have a North Star for your brand, that everything can be judged off, everything can be played off. It allows you to therefore build and build and build. You never go back to the beginning. You keep building. And so this is very important when it comes to cuts or when it comes to COVID or when it comes to anything that might happen in the world.

27:16You have the ability to respond, but through your lens, your North Star. So ours was generosity. So a good example of that was COVID. There's a problem because it coming to Easter and, you know, we had six weeks or something to get to Easter. and we had a problem because easter obviously was a vital part of the the seasonal calendar for from cadbury and people hide easter eggs at easter that's what happens people go around their houses and hide easter eggs and their cadbury easter eggs very often and so the hunt the easter egg hunt is very important part of the ritual we already we had already flipped that on its head because if you're going to be in a season hunting for eggs isn't exactly generous but the spirit of hiding them for others to go and have fun and enjoy themselves is much more generous within that season.

28:06So we had a problem in COVID, which was no one was going around to each other's houses. Hence why we faced that challenge. And through that lens, we created this thing called the worldwide hide, where people on Google Maps could go and hide an egg anywhere in the world on Google Street View for someone they loved and leave them a message there and then send them an email saying I've hidden it for you, go and look. It was incredibly powerful in those six weeks. We had three weeks to build it, and then we had three weeks for it to be aired. And in those three weeks, it ran up to Easter, 800 ,000 people spent five minutes on average hiding Easter eggs for someone they loved.

28:46So it was an incredibly powerful response. And the reason why what I'm saying is important is because it's compound creativity. It's not just the TV, it's everything we do around the brand always is through that generous lens. And no matter what the brand faces, it will respond accordingly through that lens. And so even when budgets are cut, the very nature of compound creativity means that you're not starting again. You know, you are building it maybe with slightly less budget. So, and everything we will do around that will constantly point the brand in that one direction. A couple of points, just to add on to that, actually, because I think that's really powerful, is also, you know, you can spend your way out of a problem or you can be creative.

29:33And I think what we see in the data is actually creativity is as important as to spend. So again, using your creative and the compound benefits and then leveraging all the historic equity, fluent devices, that kind of thing. But the interesting thing I thought as well, I loved your example there of Easter, is you were solving a business problem. You're using the creative platform, but you're also solving a business problem. And there's nothing, you know, from a selling in from a CMO perspective, there's nothing better than going, here's how our platform can help deliver, you know, in this case, a short term problem, but also long term.

30:02But I think the fact that you anchored it on a business, that's sometimes I know what I've, some of the tensions I've had with creative agencies. I love your idea, but my business problem is actually something quite, something quite different. And the alignment of those two is beautiful in that case. Yeah. I mean, we were, funny enough, a very small thing. We were asked to come up with a promotion for small independent stores. Now people naturally have, maybe not as strongly today as they did yesterday, but still relationships with their small independent because they go in there maybe every day, every other day, buy something small.