Winners & Shortlists

#GOODLUCKCARAMBAR

Title#GOODLUCKCARAMBAR
BrandCARAMBAR - MONDELEZ INTERNATIONAL
Product/ServiceCONFECTIONARY
Category C02. USE OF SOCIAL IN A PR CAMPAIGN
Entrant Company FRED & FARID GROUP Paris, FRANCE
Advertising Agency FRED & FARID GROUP Paris, FRANCE
Production Company GOLDEN MOUSTACHE Paris, FRANCE
Credits
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

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. To launch the campaign, and because in France the Government is above God, we started with a huge PR coup by ambushing our iconic Industry Minister, who is famous for his pro “made in France” stances, and getting him to bless Carambar’s journey to America– which he did... because who in France wouldn’t like to give a little audacity lesson to their American friends? The ambush was so unexpected that many national media decided to run the news. With one question: was the Secretary fooled once again by Carambar or was is support sincerely necessary for Carambar to achieve its quest to see Americans laugh at the little French jokes ? The answer was given in a 8 episodes real time brand documentary called goodluckcarambar. Once the campaign ended, because of its incongruous innovative format and its success in gathering buzz, we made the news again as the must-watched “buzz” – proving a pure digital campaign can end up on national TV if it touches upon a pop culture truth.

The Brief

Goals and objectives : Make Carambar the center of media conversation / debate once again. Touch upon a pop culture subject, so the campaign is considered as a newsworthy conversation subject vs. a marketing coup (which journalists either don’t like to cover or are forbidden to mention (TV/press). Our PR strategists identified a dozen of “trendy” subjects we could touch on. One of them was “Made in France”, which is a freqeunt subject in media, has been the subject of many books this past years, and has been most recently at the center of the public debate thanks to France’s Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg, who coined the theory of “national industrialism recovery” and took spectacular positions to defend “made in France” products.

Results

More than 5 000 000 free media impressions (source : Carat media) More than 45 000 poeple pressed the buzzer on the GoodluckCarambar website 65 national media talked about the campaign 3 National TV, 3 National radios, 13 news website talked, 40 blogs about the campaign. A total 7mn30 of live television and radio diffusion (without replay) for a total 3,05 Million audience covered on National TV and Radio, worth 120 000 USD. Half of French online population effectively reached by the campaign (unique reach) Starting from an audience of 100 000 fans, we ended up with 2.2 million viewers The episodes we produced was rated positively 9 times out of 10 on youtube – which is well above youtube standards (4-6 out of 10 on average) – which is even more remakable considering we’re branded content. +44k fans recruited on social network More than 140 000 persons visited the website over the 20 days that lasted the campaign.

Execution

Our real-time documentary on making America laugh was launched with the unexpected ambush of France’s Industry Minister. We knew he was a vocal defender of “Made in France” and we wanted to find in a public place where it would have been embarrassing for him to say no to us. So we managed to get a hand on his calendar, got invited to an event he was speaking at, and asked him a question like any TV crew would. We were lucky he was actually a big fan of Carambar, so he did wish us “bonne chance Carambar”. That gave us all the media coverage we needed to gather a growing audience. Our plan was no plan, as this entire campaign was shot/edited/released in real time. For the rest of the campaign, improvisation was of the essence. The idea of fielding a quantitative survey to give a more serious side to our entertaining experiment came out in the middle of the campaign.

The Situation

Carambar is only a local, low-budget brand within the Mondelez Group. And most branded content efforts in France have failed because nobody ever heard about it. So with only few euros in media support, we knew our campaign had to get free PR coverage to capture attention from the get go.

The Strategy

The main idea was to surprise French population and media once again with a new PR coup to express the power of what we at Carambar call “sweetertainment”: a surprising, entertaining ways to make people laugh at our sweet, goofy little jokes. Since Carambar is made in France, and its jokes have become an defining sub-category of French humor, we wanted to surf the wave of “Made in France” to rally French people to our cause. The only thing we needed was an objective crazy enough to raise eyebrows. We asked ourselves: what would Napoleon do? And we thought it could be quite stupid to try to export little French jokes to the country of big imperialist humor: America. So we did it.