Teenagers tend to consider themselves ‘too old’ to partake in the Christmas advent ritual, but Cadbury wanted to change this with its first Heroes Advent calendar.
The original plan was to design a traditional advent calendar pack; but to better engage teenagers, combining Augmented Reality (AR) technology with traditional design was suggested and the brief expanded.
A digital user experience based around a winter wonderland was designed and developed, incorporating both the traditional advent ritual and social media selfie-sharing. Each day of Christmas the physical calendar could be opened to reveal a chocolate treat and a new selfie filter was released, offering an immersive, fun experience to teens.
On launch in 2017, 570,000 calendars were sold (44% more than target) and more than three times the expected unique users engaged with the app. The audience didn’t just interact with it a couple of times as expected, they averaged 5.2 interactions each over the course of advent. 98,000 photos and videos were shared via the app and the experience achieved 5.7 million user impressions, ten times the target of 554,000.
