Cadbury’s Caramilk is an iconic chocolate bar that most Canadians associate with the Caramilk Secret, a popular series of ads launched 60 years ago that asked the question “how do they get the soft-flowing caramel inside the Caramilk bar?” While the Caramilk Secret remains central to the brand’s storytelling, the ads that initially made it so iconic are decades old. As a result, the brand has lost relevance and top-of-mind awareness in recent years, especially amongst the next generation of Caramilk consumers who are familiar with their products in-store, but lack any connection to the brand and its iconic history.

Oglivy’s goal was to reinvigorate this decades old campaign and make it relevant again for a younger audience. In a world where the answers to the world’s questions are just a quick Google search away, “mystery” can no longer exist.

For the past 20 years, there was always an elephant in the room anytime the Secret was talked about – if someone actually wanted to know how Cadbury got the caramel into a Caramilk bar, there were lots of websites where you could find an answer (factual or otherwise).

The strategy began with a simple question: what if you couldn’t find the answer to the Caramilk Secret online? From here, they began mapping out a plan to replace websites that allegedly revealed the Secret with their own playfully misleading web pages, and make sure they rank at the top of Google search results.

The idea was to make the Caramilk Secret Ungoogleable. Six months before the launch of their campaign, they created a series of playfully misleading web pages and then optimized every search ranking signal within their control, no matter how big or small. Working with SEO experts, they optimized their domain names, metadata, pages and content against Google keyword data for user intent, volume, and competition level. To optimize, for Trust, they then worked on generating quality inbound links across the web.

Slowly over time, their pages moved up the Google search rankings until finally, their campaign-related pages occupied 7 out of 10 of the Google search results in both French and English. Once they’d knocked out almost all the “real” answers, it was time to challenge Canadians to find the elusive Cadbury Secret via a series of broadcast spots, online videos, social posts, banners, and billboards, each encouraging Canadians to “Search For Yourself.”

Search they did; weekly search volume for “Caramilk Secret” went up 2,368% from the year prior. All that searching led to a lot of visits to their branded campaign websites which received 275,000 visits over the first two months. The ads encouraging people to search for themselves also strongly resonated with their target audience, achieving a 13.8pt increase in ad recall – almost three times the CPG average of 4.7!

They didn’t just drive engagement, they also sold a whole lot of chocolate bars. The campaign drove a 2.3pt increase in purchase intent (CPG average is +0.8pt) and an actual sales lift of 12% compared to the year prior.

And best of all, the Caramilk Secret is a secret once again.