A Glass and a Half Full of Brilliant Advertising!A Glass and a Half Full of Joy was run by Cadbury which was then known as Cadbury Schweppes from 2007 to 2008. The £6.2 million campaign was given to Fallon London, directed and created by Juan Cabral and produced by Blink Productions. The original proposal for the idea was “to step away from pushing product through traditional advertising means, and instead to produce ‘entertainment pieces’ which would appeal to a broader range of consumers and spread through viral marketing (word of mouth)” The 10 year sponsorship of Coronation Street ended here.

‘Cadbury Dairy Milk’ is the confectionary brand of “Cadbury Schweppes”, when the brand was first brought to the market in 1905 it was the only chocolate with milk as a part of the recipe. This iswhat set it apart from the other brands and why the logo is two glasses of milk pouring into a chocolate bar. This was the brands identity and the slogan was “a glass and a half full of cream milk in every half pound”

However the brand faced a shock that threatened the future of the company in 2006. The chocolate caused 40 people to become ill with salmonella and the food standard agency fined Cadbury for £1million.This lead to a recall of chocolate bars, a decline in sales (sales went down by £30 million) and of course the brand image was seriously damaged.

Cadbury recognised that they needed to re-build a positive relationship with consumers. In an attempt to have consumers associate eating their chocolate with a feeling of joy, they came upwith the campaign “a glass and a half full of joy”. The campaign wasmade up of a series of television advertisements. The company also make use of billboards, cinema, press and online facilities such as blogs; you tube a dedicated website etc.

Gorilla

The campaign kicked off with a 90 second chocolate bar advertisementfeaturing a Gorilla playing the drums along to a well-known Phil Colins song “in the air tonight”. It premiered on British televisionon the 31st Aug 2007 during the Big Brother 8 final and was viewed byan estimated 5.5 million viewers (14% of British viewers).

The advert had people talking almost instantly, people wanted to know whether it was a real gorilla or just a man in a suit, rumours suggested that it was the latter some even thought that the man in the suit was Phil Colins himself.

The suit was produced in Stan Winston Studio’s, California. Althoughit wasn’t designed specifically for the campaign advertisement special adaptations were made to it. They added a gold tooth and grey hairs to give the gorilla a more rock star look and custom madehands for the drum sequence.

The suit was delicately engineered; the silicon facial features weremoved through 27 remote-controlled motors. It took 2 engineers plus the actor (Garon Michael) inside the suit to create the different emotive facial expressions. These details are important because theyare what gave the gorilla its human attributes, they are what gave it its emotions and it is those things that enabled the human viewers to connect so well with it. However the advertisement wouldn’t have been so entertaining had the star been a human. It

works very well with a gorilla expressing himself emotionally in a very human way.

This leads to some very interesting studies that have been carried out exploring emotional influence within advertising. The following findings suggest that emotion is not only for the human species. Psychologist Antonio Dasio: University of Iowa, suggests that emotion is a “critically important component, not only to the way wehumans behave, but also to the way in which all life behaves” Damasio sees emotion as a neurobiological reaction Damasio 1994

These neurobiological reactions are triggered by things that happen around us, Damasio refers to them as “Emotionally Competent Stimulus” or ECS. Damasio suggests two different types of ECS one being music and art, (and things of those sort) where we have “become conditioned to have an emotional reaction by observing the reaction of others”.

The Gorilla gears himself up for a moment of total release; he spends 60 seconds taking deep breaths, stretching his muscles, and preparing to let loose and have maximum enjoyment. As we watch this, we do the same, Heath (Seducing The Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising) explains this a subconscious reaction where your “mirror neurons fire”.

The gorilla then unreservedly beats the drums along to the liberating well known Phil Collins lyrics,

“I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, oh Lord”

We are to associate this “moment” with Cadbury’s and it is supposed to bring joy. If it were a piano, or a guitar, it wouldn’t “feel” asliberating as our sematic memory would imagine beating drums would be. The concepts of joy and liberation that Cadbury’s expects us to feel when finally eating that bar of chocolate.

It was hoped that the campaign would boost sales back up and serve to help viewers to engage more with the brand. The minds behind the idea said they wanted to “tap into the emotional reward of having chocolate. It should be the emotional highlight of your day when youhave that piece of Cadbury Dairy Milk”

The other television advertisements work in a similar way they have very strange and unusual concepts such as dancing clothes and dancing eyebrows. The advertisements cleverly used music to convey their messages of joy; studies show that music is regarded by the general public as a highly emotional experience. Juslin and Laukka (2004) interviewed 141 , music listeners to find out the most commonreasons why people listen to music and “Factor analysis reduced the motives to four fundamental factors: identity and agency (e.g ‘to express my personality’, ‘it makes me feel competent’), mood regulation (e.g. ‘to relax and calm down’ ,’to reduce feelings of lonliness’), and enjoyment (e.g. ‘for entertainment, ‘music is beautiful’)

The advertisements have no dialogue, they are purely visual and musical, and they were specifically written to be entertaining as opposed to hard selling. The content of the advertisements have no relation to the product itself in any way.

Branding and company home colours were extremely important for this campaign since the product wasn’t made visible until the last few seconds of the advertisement in the film pack shot. The use of the colour purple in the adverts is crucial for creating an ad/product relationship (a link between the advert and the product). Cadbury can advertise in such a subtle way because they have a very long history of advertising so we know their popular signs. Such as the

logo of the two cups and the chocolate, their purple and white also the opening line “a glass and half productions”.

This type of subtle advertising could be dangerous for Cadbury’s if they failed to make their company visible; what could end up happening is people start to associate joy with chocolate, any chocolate, not Cadbury in particular. Any brand of chocolate may have benefited from this campaign. According to Google – Ngram “chocolate” itself was most talked about and written about in 2008 which marked the end of the Cadbury’s campaign.

The main medium used in this campaign was television, television is effective because it can reach the broadest audience, and it

attracts a lot of discussion and press attention. Cadbury also had the freedom to use a range of sound and visuals to convey the message. Television advertising can be expensive however and easily ignored, people have so many different ways of ignoring an advertisement now. The aim was to have this advertisement seen by “84% of the UK’s adult population on average of 10 times”

The Gorilla advertisement ran with a sponsorship of the world cup, every week during the break the advert would air. People became usedto seeing the Gorilla advertisement so often that they expected and even waited for it to air. This was building up a relationship between customers and Cabury. The advert also aired during the breakbetween the Rugby World Cup, England vs France on October 13th 2007 this slot cost Cadbury Schweppes £700,000. But because the advert was so entertaining, so long and so unusual it got the attention of many of the viewers and was hardly ignored.

Infact people went out of their way to watch the advertisement. The Gorilla advert received over 500,000 views within just one week of being uploaded. “Sky reported that, in the space of a fortnight, 58,000 households took time out of their busy days to watch a long-form version of the ad using their red button, and if parody is the next sincerest form of flattery, it is clearly a winner.” You Tuberswere creating “spoofs” of the adverts that also received many views and comments. Consumers blogged about the adverts and talked about the adverts as they won several awards over the one year campaign period.

Cadbury had a ‘dedicated website’ which was a space where viewers could talk about the advertisements. This was a self-propagated marketing technique that caused the campaign to spread from person to person – viral marketing.

The website was used to maintain a relationship that was built up with the customers via television. They had competitions like “win aprize and a half” this is a competition that Cadbury Dairy Milk run with every new product.

As you can observe from the table above, the dedicated website was created to continue the conversation and the “buzz” of the Gorilla advertisement after it had finished being aired. This was an attemptto maintain a long term relationship with the customers.

The campaign overall was an advertising success, it achieved its goal of raising sales, developing an emotional relationship with customers and conveying the message of enjoyment.

Gorilla lead to a 62% growth in sales and a 5.13% market growth, by the end of 2007 the sales increased by 7% and 9% each year since then. Cadbury Dairy Milk became the UKs number one confectionary brand and has held that title to date. Gorilla was in the top five adverts for enjoyment according to Millward Brown tests. It also earned the highest recognition test scores ever according to Hall and partners.

The campaign on a whole won many awards including #7 in the CampaignMagazine top ten cinema and T.V ads and campaign of the year 07-08. The campaign generated positive journalistic content and headlines which proved to be a successful comeback to the salmonella scare in 2006.

Bibliography

Books

Heath, R (2012). Seducing The Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 103-105.

Deliege, I, W.Davidson, J (2011). Music and the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 93.

Websites

Whitehead, J. (2008). Gorilla ad works its magic on sales of Cadbury bars. Available: http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/784573/Gorilla-ad-works-its-magic-sales-Cadbury-bars/. Last accessed 7th Dec 2012.

Rosales, E. (2008). Conceptual Frameworks for Marketing Communications. Available: http://www.slideshare.net/ELaraRosales/ELaraRosalesMarcoms-

CADBURY-AssignmentApr08?from=share_email. Last accessed 7th Dec 2012.

Anon. (2012). Gorilla (advertisment). Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_advertisement. Last accessed 7th Dec 2012.