Cadbury · VCCP London · United Kingdom and Ireland · August 2026
Cadbury’s competition promises to change someone’s life. Just not the winner’s. Back for a second year, VCCP London’s ‘Giveaway Give Away’ offers a £25,000 grand prize and thousands of smaller cash prizes. The catch? You have to give the money to someone else. You get to imagine what they’ll do when you tell them.
The Challenge
On-pack promotions are a crowded way to drive sales through one of confectionery's biggest trading periods, and most say nothing about the brand. Cadbury wanted shoppers buying participating packs, retailers stocking them, and the mechanic itself saying what Cadbury stands for: generosity.
What They Did
Shoppers buy a promotional pack of Cadbury, Sour Patch Kids, Maynards Bassetts or Trebor, scan the QR code and enter online. If selected, they nominate a friend or loved one to receive the cash. Beneath the £25,000 grand prize are four £5,000 prizes, thirty £1,000 prizes, fifty £500 prizes, and a thousand £100 and £50 prizes. The promotion runs from 3 August to 31 October across the UK and Ireland, supported by out-of-home, radio, YouTube and TikTok, with more participating products than in its first year.
Why It Works
Cadbury changes one rule of the standard promotion: who gets the money, and the whole mechanic starts arguing for the brand. Entering becomes a small act of generosity before you've won anything, because you've already thought about who you'd give it to. Cadbury's purpose lives in the terms and conditions.
Creative Deviance: Category Breaking
Cadbury makes the winner give away the prize. Breaking the winner-keeps-it convention lets the brand say generosity more powerfully than any line could, because every entry performs it. And because generosity has been Cadbury's territory for years, the reversal lands on Cadbury rather than on promotions in general.
The Tactic
Reverse Truth → Reverse the Category Rule
What to Steal
Let the name do the double take. 'Giveaway Give Away' sounds like a typo until you work out the mechanic, and working it out is the ad. A promotion name that makes people read it twice explains the twist for free. If your mechanic has a surprise in it, put the surprise in the title.
The Question That Could Get You There
What category rule could we visibly reverse so the opposite proves our point?
Or, more pointedly: which rule of our standard promotion could we flip, so that entering proves what we believe?
