Cadbury Dairy Milk Adverts

Cadbury Dairy Milk is the flagship confectionery brand for Cadbury Schweppes. Chocolate bar leader in the UK, it was worth more than £360 million in 2006 and was purchased by 65% of the population before the 'healthy eating' trend and the raising of prices of raw materials began having an impact on the confectionery market. In this time Cadbury also went through a salmonella scare leading to a huge product recall which i do not need to highlight could not have been good for business.
In 2007 Cadbury genuinely needed something that would renew their growth, the outcome was this advert...



"Rarely is one TV ad so utterly absurd and effective that it touches a nation, reshapes a brand and leaves advertising purists scrambling for the rulebook. But that’s the beauty of this beast."

It is almost universally impossible to imagine or understand how Cadbury could draw any comparisons between an avid gorilla playing a famous drum solo and a bar of Dairy Milk, even harder to comprehend why and how on earth the idea entered somebody's head in the first place.
There is no connection! Why would there be?
But this is exactly why the advert became such a huge hit.
The song, Phill Collins' 'In The Air Tonight' is key to the point and success of the advert.
Cadbury wanted to recreate an emotional relationship with key customers, to tap into the emotional reward consumers are supposed to get with a piece of Cadbury Dairy Milk. "I can feel it coming in the air tonight... and I've been waiting for this moment for all my life" helps highlight that consumers should look forward to this chocolate and it should be the emotional highlight of their day.

With this new objective Cadbury changed their slogan "a glass and half full" to "a glass and a half full....of joy"

"Created by the award-winning Fallon agency in London, the commercial has stimulated great interest, partly because it does not feature the product until the very end".

Rebecca Smithers, consumer affairs correspondent The Guardian, Tuesday 11 December 2007

The only thing interpreted as a link to 'Cadbury' included in this advert before its end is the purple screen behind the Gorilla; the same unmistakeable shade of purple that dominates the wrapper of 'Dairy Milk' and features strongly on many other Cadbury products, the colour that immediately springs to mind if asked to associate a colour with Cadbury.

The actual product is not seen until the final pack shot in the dying seconds, far from 'hard-selling', the advert is a 90 second interpretation of a pure feeling: joy.

As with the first advert the only direct association 'eyebrows' has with cadbury is through colour; the girls dress and hair clip are the same unmistakeble purple mentioned above.

I think these adverts prove that content is important, offering an entertaining pitch instead of a hard selling one has worked wonders for the product. These ad's entertain to catch attention, involve to add complicity, have a subtle branding strategy, and importantly, a message. That to me sounds like a recipe for success.

Another thing helping these adverts to stand out is their length; 3 times as long as a normal ad. Because of the success of the longer Cadbury adverts, all surpassing the minute mark, two of them into the realms of 1:30, we may decide to create a slightly longer advert ourselves.