brand-e

By Simon Fuller. Screen goo. UK confectioner Cadbury turned to a cult online cartoon to spearhead its advertising in the run-up to Easter. The Goovies campaign, which ran from January to April this year, featured episodes of Weebl & Bob, the off-the-wall cartoon originally launched in 2002 by animators Jonti Picking and Chris Vick. Nine episodes of the show were created with Cadbury’s Creme Egg at centre stage.
“We had the idea of making the Creme Egg the guest star in Weebl & Bob, with them being at the movies,” says Dan McDevitt, sales director at digital marketing outfit w00tmedia, which co-developed the films with media agency PHD. “The egg does one thing – he gets his goo out. The plots proceeded from there.”
A new episode of the show was featured on the Goovies site every fortnight, with each parodying a famous blockbuster in Weebl & Bob’s own incomparable style. Cue the likes of the Wizard of Goo, Gooshine and Goo & The City.
“Weebl & Bob is a well-established show,” says McDevitt. “It’s long-running, has been on MTV, and has over a million regular viewers.”
The cartoons have something of a cult following, particularly among young people, which suited w00tmedia when it came to promoting the videos through their own network of websites. “We have a lot [of sites] with a student-type audience – 16-to-24 year-olds,” says McDevitt. “With this audience, they’re online a lot and so you have to make [advertising] interesting – it has to stand-out.”
This was particularly true given the length of the campaign. “Cadburys’ broadcast activity is burst-oriented: [they advertise in] big bursts of activity,” says McDevitt. “They have small online budgets – they can’t justify spending on online audiences continually.”
But it seems to have paid off. “The people loved it,” he says. “[The movies received] well over a million views, a lot for online audiences, especially as it has not been rabidly publicised. It’s [been] more of an underground thing.”