MAM
Cadbury Gems brings in kids from across the nation to celebrate its birthday
Mumbai: Cadbury Gems, one of India’s oldest and much-loved chocolate button brands, hosted a one-of-its-kind virtual birthday party, inviting parents with their kids, from across the country.
The celebration was powered through a mobile-friendly interactive microsite that enabled kids to consume entertaining content, while playing micro-games. Cadbury Gems is also partnering with some NGOs to have the event unfolded in a few orphanages and celebrate the day with cakes & goodies.
With the pandemic and all the restrictions that came with it, kids have missed going to school, meeting friends and most importantly dampened the birthday spirit amongst children, something kids really love and look forward to. Cadbury #GemsBigBirthdayParty gave a chance to celebrate a special day online, said the brand.
Speaking on the success of the birthday party with Cadbury Gems, Mondelez India senior director – marketing, Anil Viswanathan said, “As a brand that has always been known for bringing alive masti and joy, we wanted to find a unique way to gift kids this experience and not let the pandemic get the better of their excitement. Over the last one year, celebrations have taken newer shapes courtesy the infinite possibilities that digital mediums offer. At Mondelez India, we continue to find these newer avenues of engagement that allow us to create meaningful moments of joy with our consumers.”
The unique party format not only got the children and their parents to be a part of a world record where thousands of them popped open a pack of ‘More Chocolaty Gems’ at the start of the event, but also engage with favourite animated characters like Chhota Bheem and child YouTube kids’ sensation ‘Aayu and Pihu’.
Commenting on the campaign, Ogilvy India, executive creative director, Neville Shah said, “Cadbury Gems is a brand that has stood for masti. And as a brand, we couldn’t just sit back and let one more birthday party be reduced to a simple video call. Especially ours. That’s where the idea stemmed from. The advantage was it was going to be online. We decided this was going to be the biggest, funniest, most colorful birthday party yet. We leveraged technology, made influencers seek invitations and showcased content.”
Wavemaker India, chief client officer and head – West, Shekhar Banerjee added, “We are in a world where birthday wishes over video calls is becoming a norm, but it is nowhere close to a big birthday party with so many experiences. Our challenge was to make sure we create an experience that is unique for families and their kids, especially those who have missed out on the fun of celebrating birthday parties during the pandemic. The response was overwhelming, lakhs of consumers registered for the event and enjoyed the party. Big enough to be called the biggest virtual birthday in the world as per Guinness World Records.”
Brands
Apple turns 50: half a century of thinking different
From a Californian garage to a global giant, the Cupertino company reflects on five dizzyingly creative decades
CALIFORNIA: It began in a garage. It ends, fifty years later, as one of the most valuable companies on earth. Apple is turning 50, and if that sounds like a midlife crisis waiting to happen, the Cupertino firm is having absolutely none of it.
Founded on 1 April 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has marked its golden anniversary with a letter from chief executive Tim Cook and a promise to keep doing what it has always done: irritate the status quo until something brilliant falls out.
The company announced it will spend the coming weeks celebrating its milestone with its global community of customers, developers, and employees, reflecting on the products and ideas that have, over five restless decades, managed to reshape entire industries.
And what a list of reshaping it is. The Apple II brought the personal computer into living rooms. The Macintosh made it loveable. The iPod put a thousand songs in your pocket and made the music industry very nervous indeed. Then came the iPhone, which did to mobile phones what the Mac had done to computing, and changed daily life so thoroughly that it is now difficult to remember what boredom felt like. The iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Vision Pro followed, each one arriving with the same quiet confidence that it was, obviously, the future.
The services have quietly become just as essential. The App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, Apple Pay, and Apple TV now form the digital scaffolding of millions of daily routines, the kind of infrastructure you only notice when it is gone.
In his anniversary letter, Cook struck a deliberately human note, steering away from the language of market caps and quarterly earnings. The most meaningful chapters, he wrote, are written not by Apple but by the people who use its technology. The nurse who kept in touch with patients. The parent who caught their toddler’s first steps on an iPhone. The writer who finished the book. The runner who crossed the finish line.
“In your hands, the tools we make have improved lives, and sometimes even saved them,” Cook wrote, in one of the letter’s more striking lines. It is a bold claim, though not an unfounded one, given Apple Watch’s now well-documented history of detecting irregular heart rhythms and alerting wearers who had no idea anything was wrong.
Cook, who has led the company since Jobs stepped down in 2011, was careful to credit everyone except himself. The letter thanks Apple’s global teams, its developer community, and the millions of customers who have been, in the company’s preferred parlance, thinking different alongside them.
The anniversary announcement also offered a quiet signal about Apple’s current preoccupations. Alongside the expected nods to privacy and environmental responsibility, Cook specifically mentioned Apple Intelligence, the company’s on-device artificial intelligence platform, as a sign of where the next chapter is headed. If the past fifty years were about putting powerful tools in people’s hands, the next chapter appears to be about making those tools think.
The letter closes with a passage lifted, with only a small tweak, from the original 1997 “Think Different” advertisement, that famous roll-call of the misfits, the rebels, and the round pegs in square holes. It remains, even now, one of the most effective pieces of brand storytelling ever written. Whether it still fits a company with a two-trillion-pound valuation is a question Apple is presumably choosing not to ask itself on its birthday.
Celebrations are expected to continue through the spring, with details to be announced in the coming weeks. For now, the garage in Los Altos, California, where it all began, remains a modest historical footnote. The company it spawned is anything but.
