Cadbury Secret Santa
Cadbury was back for the third year in a row; giving the people of the UK the chance to send chocolate secretly to someone they love once again. This is through a nationwide version of Secret Santa – the traditional Christmas time game of giving gifts anonymously between a group of friends and family. Previously this was thanks to a much loved touring Postal Service where you just needed to put a chocolate bar in an envelope, fill in the name and address, and Cadbury Postal Service Workers would send that chocolate bar to your loved one on your behalf, and all for free.
But at the end of 2020 when we needed cheering up more than ever. In the year when socialising had to be reduced to a minimum, events cancelled, and non-essential shops and services closed. How could we help keep the spirit of Christmas alive across the UK with Cadbury Secret Santa?
It couldn’t be a real world experiential event like before. So a chatbot? A voice skill? A voucher code programme? Christmas in Fortnite? We needed to keep it as real as possible. Real people interacting, and creating a real sense of genuine kind hearted giving for each other.
So, ensuring the experience is safe and accessible (and GDPR compliant) this year we moved the entire service online and into everyone’s homes. Creating an online, live streaming remote Postal Service for Cadbury for Christmas 2020.
Consumers were able to access the online portal and have a live face-to-face video conversation with real Cadbury Postal Service workers in order to send their chocolatey treat on to a loved one, for free. At the end of the process Cadbury added another special element.
Each Secret Santa was able to send an anonymous Secret Santa message along with their chocolate to their recipient, thanks to the latest webAR and video recording technology. This allowed the Secret Santa mask – an icon of the campaign – to cover your face ensuring your identity remained a secret while you recorded a message to go with your gift. Recipients of Secret Santa parcels were encouraged to check for their own secret personalised message via a QR code within their parcel.
In addition to this, we added some excitement to the virtual queuing process, with a Christmas quiz and classic Christmas jokes which kept the thousands who joined in entertained at those busy moments where you needed to wait in line to speak to a Postal Service Worker and become a Cadbury Secret Santa.
When you took part you were also helping to spread the magic even further. Cadbury partnered with the Trussell Trust so when you secretly sent that delicious Cadbury chocolate to someone you love through the online Postal Service, Cadbury matched this and sent a second bar to a food bank in the Trussell Trust network on your behalf. To help make Christmas that little bit more magical for people who need to use food banks at this time of the year.
Within 12 days we were out of stock, over 21,000 chocolate bars were gifted. Secret Santa has always been exceptionally popular with the public and we expected no different when we took the campaign online, with a remote version of the Postal Service. Utilising Microsoft Azure cloud hosting, we developed a microservice based cloud platform that could meet all peak traffic requirements as social and meda activity created a buzz around the activity.
The platform connected Postal Service workers and the customer together remotely with an in-browser peer-to-peer video call- which allowed the customer to choose their bar of choice and pass on the delivery details. Following the video call, the user was invited to record a secret personalised video, this video recording utilised the latest WebAR technology and worked across mobile and desktop browsers without the need to download an app or plug-in. Finally, the platform managed all wait times, queues, CRM, and fulfilment at all stages of the process, ensuring that people were engaged even when the lines were all full.
21,015
SECRET SANTA GIFTS WERE SENT OUT
14,494
AR SECRET VIDEO MESSAGES MADE
4.8/5
AVERAGE NPS SCORE
