Title	#GOODLUCKCARAMBAR
Brand	CARAMBAR - MONDELEZ INTERNATIONAL
Product/Service	CONFECTIONARY
Category	A02. NON-FICTION: SERIES OR FILM
Entrant Company	FRED & FARID GROUP Paris, FRANCE
Contributing Company	FRED & FARID GROUP Paris, FRANCE
Contributing Company 2	GOLDEN MOUSTACHE Paris, FRANCE

Name	Company	Position
Fred/Farid	FRED/FARID GROUP	Chief Creative Officers
Julien Pierre Mallet	FRED/FARID GROUP	Copywriter
Thomas Raillard	FRED/FARID GROUP	Art Director
François Grouiller	FRED/FARID GROUP	Head Of Strategy
Florent Depoisier	FRED/FARID GROUP	Account Director
Koniba Pleah	FRED/FARID GROUP	Agency Producer
Magali Genetay/Magali Mirault/Anne Galavielle	CARAMBAR CARAMBAR MONDELEZ INTERNATIONAL	Clients

The Campaign

Most branded content efforts in France have failed either because people saw it as fake, or because it failed to entertain them. Indeed, today branded content competes directly with unbranded content released by production companies, users or Youtube celebrities. This “genuine” content is the one that’s the most likely to be shared on social networks. It has also to be noted that any brand mention on TV is forbidden and punished with tough sanctions against the TV channels, unless it’s considered as “news worthy”.

Results

With one billion candy bars sold every year, Carambar is an institution in France, where it reached iconic status, mainly because of its very famous jokes, which appear in the inside of the candy wrappers. “Carambar jokes” have become an entire sub-category of French humor and a generic term to designates goofy jokes. Yet French people love those jokes so much that last year, when we pretended we would replace them with school exercises, people protested and started 17 petitions – which made the brand top-of-mind. This year, our objective was to be top-of-mind again (which is the key success factor in the candy category) – but rather than a short-term coup, we had to be talked about all along our promotional activity period (from end of March to mid-April). Strong of last year’s demonstration of love for our silly jokes, we decided to test the power of our typically French jokes in America. Introducing “Good Luck Carambar”, the very first -and forever goofiest – experiment in “real-time brand content”. A two-week documentary composed of 8 episodes that were each scripted, shot, edited and released in less than 24 hours, based on the choices of the audience and the unexpected twist and turns happening on-site. Playing on the French timeless pride for their culture, as well as their current apprehension of its irreversible decline, we asked our people to send us their encouragements, so that, just for once, rather than importing American culture in France, we would import French culture in America. (Well, that’s if you consider this silly jokes as culture.) The center of our social ecosystem was a specially designed web platform (goodluckcarmabar.com) where people could watch the last episodes, wish us “good luck”, post original content and win some fun supporter kits.

To draw audience to our content, we activated four triggers to play with: 1. An editorial idea that’s essentially original and resonates with “pop culture” ⇨ to reverse the usual trend of importing American cultural goods to France, and for once export French cultural goods (our goofiest jokes) to America 2. A Youtube celebrity among teenagers ⇨ Baptiste Lorber, our “ambassador” works for the French equivalent of “Funny or die” 3. Content that’s news worthy and with an original twist in the way it’s produced so people wants don’t want to miss it. ⇨ The first experiment of “real-time brand content”, with 8 episodes written, shot, edited and released in less than 24 hours 4. A clever social media engagement that give people reasons to share the content with their friends ⇨ The choice for the audience to vote for the challenges our ambassador had to take on.

a/ We managed to create original, unexpected content in quasi real time, by taking up some crazy challenges the audience gave us: - Getting the French Minister of Industry to wish “Good Luck Carambar”. - Flying a Carambar joke in the sky of Los Angeles - Getting a gospel band to sing a Carambar joke - Convincing the management of the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles to let us tell jokes on stage - Managing to hack the jumbotron on a NBA game with one of our jokes b/ The content captured people’s attention -the campaign reached half of online French population -starting from an audience of 100 000 fans, we ended up with 2.2 million viewers -55k people pushed the buzzer to wish us “good luck” -one tweet every 8 seconds the day of the launch. 10 000 tweets in 20 days . -we broke an industry record in France with the most engaging post on Facebook - 25000 likes and 2500 shares c/ We bypassed government regulations on brand content -in mainstream media, our content ignited a larger debate on the decline of “made in France” -the operation was mentioned several time on national TV for a total of 3 minutes, because of the buzz created (which categorized us as “newsworthy vs. advertising) -we got 21 full articles after the Minister of Industry endorsed us