What we Learnt From Accidentally Printing Over a Billion QR codes on Cadbury Chocolate #MarketerStories #DigitalSense

As marketers we like to talk about the importance of storytelling, but it’s rare we tell many stories of our own. What really went on behind the scenes to make that campaign happen and what could we all learn from it? Well, here’s one of my Marketer Stories...

Have you ever pressed print on a long document and then realised it’s not the one you need anymore? Feels annoying and wasteful if you cannot stop those sheets coming out or the printer. Now multiply that by a couple of billion, how would that feel?

Let me start by saying this is not a comparable tale of huge paper & printing wastage... but it is the story of what I learnt at Cadbury when we put a QR code on well over a billion bars, that in the end no one really needed to be there. As Cadbury Dairy Milk starts to roll out its first new packaging in 7 years, with a new design by Bulletproof, it does mean the end of the little known ‘Scan for Joy’ era, just a few billion bars after it began. That’s what made me think it’s time to tell this story.

I worked on the global Cadbury team back in 2012 when Kate Wall and others were planning to roll out the vibrant previous version of the packaging, code named Peacock. It came at an interesting time when everyone was talking digital transformation, augmented reality and even ‘Packtivation’ - how you use the pack to trigger digital interactive experiences. Frankly you could write that same sentence now I suppose with little change, so perhaps things haven’t moved on so far after all.

Cadbury was the global launch partner for the AR app BlippAR, so we’d experimented in this space before, but also learnt that few people engaged without a clear call to action on pack. Fast forward past an exec summit in Silicon Valley and here we were: advanced Packtivation schemes with content, loyalty points and all sorts were suddenly on the table. There were Internet of Things (IOT) start-ups being lined up, multi-million-pound content campaigns considered, games, interactivity and more.

I’m not writing this whole article just to say “we told you so” but at the time the actual digital team had its doubts. Certainly it was interesting, innovative and a joyfully enthusiastic use of technology, but we weren’t convinced it really matched consumer behaviour, or was what the brand most needed to focus on. My boss Sonia Carr and I pitched a far less glamorous ‘Storytelling at Scale’ project which was about making our Facebook and YouTube content better and then investing meaningful media behind it to actually make those channels deliver at scale. In fairness to the business our project did also get an understated nod of approval and kicked off what became a far bigger comms transition across the Mondelēz business.

Meanwhile, with the Canadian team stepping up to build out the Packtivation approach we looked at how we could make the most of it. We stressed that all that back-end investment would be a waste of time if consumers didn’t know about it and that it needed to be on pack. We also stressed that we needed to try and minimise the barriers to entry as much as possible, so we pushed back on developing new mobile apps etc. and tried to use native phone functionality to engage. The biggest hope was to get unique codes on every bar, but the practicalities, costs etc of that were insurmountable for a relatively rapid launch project, so were delayed into a later phase.

Global packaging changes tend to have a longer lead time than digital builds, but by joyful coincidence a complete new global pack redesign was being signed off at the time. In a last-minute push, the team managed to squeeze the QR codes into the design scheme for most of the bars in the range. No one knew exactly what the final Packtivation experience would be, so they had an open call to action of ‘Scan for Joy’, based on the brand’s platform at the time of ‘Free the Joy’. Cadbury sells over 350 million bars of chocolate a year, the whole range of which was being brought into the new design, so that’s quite a big commitment.

The Packtivation project hit its biggest snag when the Canadian team came back to present and align for ongoing funding. Whilst an advanced market they represented a small part of the Cadbury business and they needed the strong buy-in of the UK, India and Australia to make something big happen. Unfortunately, those market leaders ultimately didn’t see how this potentially large ongoing investment would truly deliver on their biggest challenges (like most brands, driving penetration into relatively light users) and so they pulled the plug on funding what felt like had become a bloated concept.

In the UK it was too late to stop the printer though. Hundreds of millions of QR codes were coming our way whether we liked it or not. We were an agile bunch used to thinking on our feet though and so a far smaller brief was created to build a simple micro site with curated Joy-enduring content and drive people to that instead. It was a project budgeted at just tens of thousands but delivered a simple experience and a different random piece of content every time. Each designed to trigger the same type of spontaneous joy that a bite of chocolate was trying to.

The team tried to think of the ‘scan for Joy’ QR code as a piece of owned media, making the packaging work harder for them. Over the following couple of years we pointed it at various activations, competitions and opportunities. Today however when you scan the code on the back of the pack you just get taken to the Cadbury website, and on the exact day I tried a sales promotion at that. Not exactly spontaneous Joy but it speaks to the ultimate fate of the QR code.

Despite those hundreds of millions of packs, I never saw a spike of more than a few thousand trying it out. The code was on the back, the call to action was vague, and in the end, we backed away from referencing it in any of our wider communications... but the evidence suggested it wasn’t something consumers were bothering to engage with and over time it became harder to justify continuing to do anything more with it. Perhaps a more advanced ecosystem with better games, content rewards, loyalty points etc could have captured people’s hearts and made it work? Or perhaps we dodged a bullet and avoided wasted investment, making the most of an unexpected situation. Either way I’ll be sad to see these little QR codes gone (which I assume they will be...?) when the new packs roll out.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering what you can learn from this to justify the time wasted spent reading it? Well here goes...

Digital Transformation is Often Slower Than We Think. You cannot ignore the digital transformation around us, but we can stop running around saying it’s moving faster and faster and out of our control. The very same conversations that led to these QR codes are still happening in brand meetings to this day. The consumer change is often slower than we think. Take the time to work out how digital can really turbo charge your business, don’t just jump into a buzz word or technology. Often this means applying digital technology and approaches in remarkably traditional ways.

That Said, Be Agile. Don’t spend too much time trying to create the absolute perfect digital transformation strategy, even if time is on your side. Get started with smaller tests, see what works and what doesn’t, and when things go in unexcepted directions get ready to change your own course quickly too. Perhaps you have to be bold and commit to something like a pack design, but you can still be agile in the response that follows.

Speak Up, Louder. It you’re a digital or media expert and you have worries or questions about a project around you, don’t sit on them. Your company pays you for your expertise so bring it to the surface when it matters most... but come with solutions and alternatives, not just problems & challenges.

Communicate Clearly to Consumers. It’s obvious but consumers are busy people. Putting a QR code on the back of their chocolate bar and hoping they’ll see it is unlikely to cut through. If you really want to go down this sort of a route, you’re going to need to make it really blooming obvious and then shout about it a lot. Though please then ask yourself, if I must advertise this clever thing to get people doing it... is it really that clever at all?

Keep it... Simpler. As an industry we love making things complicated and interactive. As consumers we love things to be simple and get out of our way. For the most part chasing deeper digital engagement, certainly for low interest consumer brands, is a fool’s errand to begin with. If you do go with it look at what you’re proposing and make it at least a couple of steps simpler, it’ll probably be cheaper and better.

Don’t Get too Far Ahead of Technology. When Cadbury made their bars AR activated through BlippAR nearly all the scans came from Soho in London. Marketing people being impressed by other marketing people. The notion of holding up a chocolate bar to your camera and getting an AR experience was light years away from the consumers’ minds. Things have changed a fair amount, AR is growing, and most smart phone cameras can now natively read QR codes. Doesn’t mean you’ll see many people trying to do it though (big Asian exceptions excluded). It can be innovative and fun to try things at the cutting edge of technology, but invest your real time and effort into what you know will work.

And CRUCIALLY Don’t do Things Just Because You Can. FAR too much tech use in marketing comes from that technology being available and us wanting to do something with it. About the only good example of commercial packaging AR I can think of are those virtual mirrors in Lego stores, and tellingly they don’t get you to use your own phone. Almost all examples of AR are cool, exciting and magical... but entirely impractical based on any real understanding of consumers.

 Does a consumer want an AR experience in a busy supermarket? No. Will an AR experience work on packaging they use quickly and throw away? No. Could AR work on something like a cereal box that you sit in front of for several minutes every day? Maybe, but even then, who really has the time?

We need to find ways to use any sorts of added digital touch points to make consumer’s lives easier, faster and better and then they might just use them. If we’re just trying to throw interactive marketing in their faces, they will continue saying no.

Do you have one of these #MarketerStories to tell? Whether a small annecdote or a long dramatic telling I'd love to hear some of the other behind-the-scenes stories that have led to the brands and adverts we all know.