Ad Of The Month
There’s goodness in togetherness with Cadbury
South-East Asia: Cadbury
Chinese New Years Eve is a time for reunions and fireworks, and that’s when Cadbury’s new Singapore ad is set. An elderly man is spending the holiday alone – perhaps he has no more living relatives? – while his neighbours celebrate next door. But then their lights go out. Fortunately the old man is good with electrics, and pops over to help.
Then comes the twist – as he climbs the stepladder, the lights go on. The power failure was just an excuse to get him to visit, and at the top of the ladder there’s a Cadbury chocolate gift and an invitation to become part of his neighbor’s family reunion party.
We tested the ad using our Test Your Ad platform, which predicts an ad’s potential for long- and short-term profitable growth. Cadbury’s ad scored 4.2-Star, a strong performance and one of the best New Year ads we’ve seen.
It’s an important initiative for Cadbury, whose owner Mondelez is keen to grow chocolate sales in Asia as a counterweight to declining sales in Western markets. Chocolate is an ideal and popular New Year gift, so it’s in Cadbury’s interests to associate its brand with the holiday as firmly and positively as it can.
The ad does its job well – while the storytelling at the beginning is a little obscure, the reveal of the neighbour’s kindly act makes everything make sense, and we see a satisfying bump in happiness and surprise when the old man discovers the chocolate. “A reunion full of goodness with a gift from the heart” reads the tagline, driving home the themes of the ad.
Lots of Chinese New Year ads will play on themes of reunion and generosity – they are such a critical part of the holiday. What Cadbury have done here is use those themes to tell a simple but well-crafted story that touches on a real issue in Asian markets – there are a lot of older people who will find themselves alone this year, whether because they are unable to travel or because they have lost contact with families. That’s why this ad is so emotionally effective and why the response to it was so positive.