Firefox compatible

Client: Cadbury Schweppes
Creative Agency: VML
Technology Vendor: PointRoll

Cadbury Schweppes offers users an interactive experience with its recent campaign for Diet Dr Pepper. To increase the household penetration of Diet Dr Pepper, the company created a banner ad, which boasts the product's "Nothing Diet About It" tagline. The ad allows users to customize their own decadent Diet Dr Pepper cake. The banner features tools such as a pastry bag filled with frosting, candles and letters.

After users decorate their Diet Dr Pepper cake, they can share their decorated cake with friends.

Robert Stone, interactive manager for Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages noted, "We wanted to educate consumers that not all diet soft drinks require a taste sacrifice. We feel this is a great extension of our offline campaign and carries the overall thematic very well." 
-- Nanette Marcus, cover stories editor, iMedia Connection

Sometimes we forget that the internet is fun. It's irreverent. Although we now spend most of our days as tools to the corporate dictate, every now and then someone sends us something that makes us smile. The mistake that most marketers make is that they go for that irreverence without any connection to their brand.

This campaign succeeds in avoiding that trap. Here's how. It's Diet Dr Pepper and it conveys the taste of the product through the cake. We almost lick our lips thinking of cake. That, in itself, would have made it a success. The idea of taste is probably one of the most difficult things to convey through the web. But it also encourages interaction in a way that enables brand awareness. Although it's a cake, you are really decorating a Dr Pepper logo. Your primary interaction -- your focus when interacting with the creative -- has you focus right on that.

Now, if they're only smart enough to run it on Facebook targeted around people's friend's birthdays, anniversaries, etc., then they'll have closed the loop on the other side with the media. So, my birthday was this month. Where's my Diet Dr Pepper cake?
-- Sean X Cummings, director of marketing, Ask.com

Birthdays are magical times. You feel warm and fuzzy, people acknowledge you in a special way, and there's almost always some cake involved. What better way for Diet Dr Pepper to win attention, associate the product and prompt interaction with its creative? It feels about as natural as any other soda commercial motif.

There are several things to like about this expandable execution. The fact that it features a rollover-to-expand is one of them, because only a portion of the unit, the left third that contains the call-to-action, triggers the expanding panel. Requiring a click-to-expand would not have yielded results, and making the entire unit sensitive to [accidental] rollover would have inflated the results and annoyed uninterested users.

Upon expanding, you can decorate a birthday cake and send it to a friend. The cake is, of course, branded Diet Dr Pepper, which is also easy to mask with the supplied icing tool. In addition, one could, in theory, send a very "unbirthday" message to someone using the text box tool. Aside from brand association "what-ifs," the viral payoff is what really gives the creative legs -- otherwise, who wants to decorate their own cake? The only real letdown from a user perspective happens if your mouse travels outside the expanded panel before you've typed your friend's email. If so, I hope you didn't spend too much time on your masterpiece, because once the panel closes and your customized cake disappears, you may not bother to start over, your friend may not get their birthday treat, and Diet Dr Pepper's pass-along rates may not be what they could have been. Better if the panel stayed open until the user hits the close button. With rich media campaigns, thoughtful coding is more than just icing on the cake.
-- Rob Tucker, founder, rt interactive