Thread by @unclebernbach

Cadbury's ‘Gorilla’. EXPLAINED.

A thread explaining one of the most entertaining ads of all time.

1/ ‘In the Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins starts to play. Suddenly, we see the face of a gorilla. We watch his facial expressions. He takes a deep breath. He stretches. We see a drum set. The gorilla is preparing for something… And we all wonder what is about to happen.

2/ Those were the feelings the British public was going through in 2007 when Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’ was on TV for the first time.

The ad with a gorilla playing drums, which almost never got made, made advertising the topic of the country.

3/ ‘Gorilla’ is a 90-sec TV spot created by ad agency Fallon for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate brand in 2007.

It was one of the most awarded ads of the 2000s and changed the fortunes of the Cadbury brand after years of declining sales.

4/ In 2006, Cadbury was in a bad spot. The traditional British brand had multiple years of declining sales and was in the middle of recalling more than a million Dairy Milk chocolate bars amid fears of salmonella contamination.

5/ Sales fell 14% over the following four weeks after the recall, with an estimated cost of £20 million to Cadbury’s books. And an even bigger damage to the company’s brand image.

6/ When the investigation was wrapped, 37 people were affected by contaminated Dairy Milk chocolate. Cadbury found themselves in an unusual state of declining sales and low public trust.

7/ In the middle of this madness, Phil Rumbol joined Cadbury as a Marketing Director, tasked with restoring the nation’s love for Cadbury’s chocolate.

As one of his first assignments, Rumbol was preparing a brief for an ad campaign to move the brand in the right direction.

8/ “I wanted an ad that was as enjoyable to consume as a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate,” Rumbol explained.

The brief given to ad agency Fallon was summarized in this way: “Eating Cadbury’s chocolate makes you feel good.”

9/ At the same time, Juan Cabral was in the middle of a heated discussion with his work mates:

“We were discussing who did the best drum solo of all time, someone said, ‘it’s this one’, another said, ‘no, it’s this one’ and then I said, ‘no, it’s definitely Phil Collins’.

10/ “I said ‘he’s animalistic, he’s like a gorilla drumming’ and as soon as I said it that image stuck with me.” said Cabral.

That night, he went home with a “burning desire” to write what he imagined would be a short film script.

11/ A week later Cadbury came to Fallon, where Cabral worked as a Creative Director.

Rumbol explained the situation, asking that “Cadbury ads should feel as good as eating the product itself”.

12/ The Fallon team believed it was key to shift the focus from the formulaic approach of the previous Dairy Milk campaign to a more emotional one.

With that direction, Cabral started to work on the brief. But somehow the image of a gorilla playing drums never left his head.

13/ A week later, the Cadbury team came to Fallon for the first creative presentation.

“We presented two other very good ideas, both of which had chocolate at the heart of them, and then there was ‘Gorilla’, which we presented last.” remembered Cabral.

14/ It was time to present the 'Gorilla' idea.

“My colleague pressed play and ‘In the Air Tonight’ started to play and I began to read the script. By the end I knew something was happening, I didn’t know if it was good or bad but there was definitely a shift.” told Cabral.

15/ Rumbol was also excited: “I just remember myself and my team walking into the side room and grinning from ear to ear.

We thought it hit the brief in terms of making people feel something.” he said.

16/ The Marketing Director left Fallon with the next step of showing the ‘Gorilla’ script to his bosses.

It did not go well. “When I shared it with my superiors, it’s fair to say they thought I was mad.” remembered Rumbol.

17/ “They said, ‘so you want to make an ad 3x longer than a normal ad, that doesn’t feature any chocolate and there’s no message?’ It was the hardest thing [I’ve had to sell] in my career,” confessed Rumbol.

18/ Rumbol acknowledged the ad was unconventional. But he argued that the fact it didn’t have chocolate in it was not as important as making people feel something, which ‘Gorilla’ did that job.

After dozens of meetings, he got the approval to produce the film.

19/ The first decision made during pre-production was to have Fallon’s Cabral to direct the film. It was his idea in the end and he was tasked with executing it.

20/ Cabral started by finding the perfect gorilla suit in Los Angeles. It was the suit used in Hollywood blockbusters such as ‘Gorillas In The Mist’ and ‘Congo’.

The suit was complex to operate, so they looked for an actor with experience in such roles.

21/ Garon Michael was chosen, having played parts in films using a similar costume. Michael was also a musician, which would come in handy for the project.

22/ Next came the task of teaching Michael, who had never touched a drum, to play like Phil Collins.

Being a musician, Michael got the rhythm of the drumming right away, but playing with the costume on, where he couldn’t see anything, was incredibly challenging.

23/ Getting the rights to the music, however, was easier than everyone thought. Phil Collins bought the idea instantly and the negotiations were brief.

Collins remembers getting approached about the ad.

24/ Filming the advert was a tall task for Michael. The insane heat inside the gorilla suit meant shooting was limited to only a couple of minutes at a time.

Micheal would have, drenched in sweat, a quick break, a sip of water and be back for the next session.

25/ Shooting took one day, editing another two. The final ad was presented to the client over a month after it was commissioned.

Happy with the edit, Rumbol went to his superiors at Cadbury to show the film. The reaction was not good again.

26/ “I was told: ‘You are never showing this ad’,” said Rumbol.

Cadbury’s management was concerned about how much it diverged from category conventions. There was no chocolate in the ad. No people experiencing the product.

27/ A perceived risk with more than 50% of Cadbury's sales coming from Dairy Milk.

The ad was put on the back burner. But Rumbol persevered and after four months got his way when research came back showing an “overwhelming” response to the gorilla.

28/ “It was a challenge, but more and more the power of the creative won through, and in the pre-testing that we did, while it didn’t make much sense, it certainly elicited the feeling we were looking for and came through as incredibly powerful.” said Rumbol.

29/ Six months after the original pitch, on August 31st 2007, ‘Gorilla’ made its TV debut during the live final of the reality show Big Brother.

The ad would also play in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.

30/ The response from the public was overwhelmingly positive. ‘Gorilla’ became one of the first viral videos on Youtube, being shared by people all over the world.

The ad became such a phenomenon that it had people searching channels to catch the commercial again.

31/ ‘Gorilla’ helped Cadbury bounce back from the salmonella crisis of the year before, boosting sales by 9%.

The ad also won many awards, including the Grand Prix at Cannes. And it made Phil Collins come back to the top of the rankings, with ‘In the Air Tonight’ reaching #1.

32/ In 2018, Marketing Week reported that a decade after it was released, 76% of people remembered that it was a campaign for Cadbury despite not featuring any chocolate at all.

33/ “You have to go out and seduce. You need to feel like there’s humanity there. If you feel there’s a corporation, the outcome is terrible,” said Juan Cabral when speaking about the success of ‘Gorilla’.

34/ “A brand needs to go to the heart and not to the brain,” summarized Cabral.

‘Gorilla’ repositioned Cadbury from manufactures of chocolate to ‘producers of happiness’ in consumers minds. All thanks to a gorilla playing the drums like Phil Collins.

35/ Some of the sources for this thread:
theguardian.com/media-network/…
marketingweek.com/cadbury-gorill…
contently.com/2021/03/31/bra…
dandad.org/en/d-ad-cadbur…
medium.com/@shubham.praka…
campaignlive.co.uk/article/neuros…
adage.com/article/the-cr…