Cadbury’s New Classic Shows the Power of a Great Edit

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Cadbury’s “A Glass And A Half” campaign has brought us some of the best ads of the last decade: you can see its influence across every sector of UK advertising. The brand, with agency of record VCCP, turned away from the brashness of the confectionery sector and brought us a new kind of chocolate ad – small slices of ordinary life which focused on the moments of joy a gift of chocolate brings.

The Cadbury ads’ aesthetic was quietly revolutionary. With natural lighting and no music on the soundtrack, there’s a sense with a Cadbury ad of real human moments cutting through the noise of advertising. It’s helped their ads score multiple 5-Star Ratings on our Test Your Ad platform, where the simple, emotional storytelling in commercials like “Birthday” or “Garage” resonates with ordinary viewers.

“Homesick”, their latest ad, is also the latest to earn 5-Stars in Test Your Ad (a 5.3-Star Rating, to be exact). What’s interesting is that the highest scoring version of Homesick isn’t the full length one, it’s the 30 second edit which makes important changes to the ad – changes which the audience, it turns out, prefer. Let’s look at what those are.

The story of “Homesick” is as natural and touching as any of Cadbury and VCCP’s work. It’s about a young woman who’s moved abroad to Kuala Lumpur, and is still getting used to life in a whole new country. She gets a packet from her kid sister, and leaves her a voicemail full of thanks but also worrying that the girl is spending too much of her pocket money on postage. Then she opens the pack – it’s a bar of Dairy Milk, with a chunk missing and the open packet carefully taped down!

The more effective 30 second version keeps the story of the voicemail and the present from home, but makes it clear early on that it’s Cadbury, showing a signature purple envelope instead of the standard brown airmail package. More importantly, the shorter version takes the bold move of cutting out the punchline showing that baby sis has eaten some of the chocolate. It ends with the woman looking at the package and smiling.

This short version of the ad scores Exceptional ratings on all three of our key Test Your Ad metrics – Star Rating, for long-term business impact; Spike Rating, for short term sales gain; and Brand Fluency, for quick and accurate recognition. That trifecta puts “Homesick” in the very top tier of confectionery ads.

So why do the edits make the ad work better? It’s because the woman moving overseas and getting a care package from her sister is already a very emotional scenario, so moving the reveal that it’s Cadbury earlier helps push that positive emotion higher more quickly. And while the “missing chunk” ending is funny and warm, it’s also an easy visual detail to miss and one that some audiences could interpret negatively. The edit resolves that – it turns out this slice of life is touching enough that it doesn’t need a punchline.

Shorter edits often test differently from full-length versions. If you get the edit right, you can make the ad more effective and more cost-effective at the same time: more impact for less airtime. Testing both versions – or trying multiple edits – is the smart way of investing upfront to make sure your ad is the most effective it can be, at whatever length it airs.