Cadbury Worldwide Hide: How the Chocolatier Made the Hiding Eggs Ritual Possible with Google Maps
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Editor’s note: Today’s post is a Q&A with the VCCP London and VCCP CX team. VCCP London conceived of and built the Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform using Google Maps Platform as a way to get consumers ‘hiding’ eggs and engaging with loved ones during a time when they could not be physically together.
How did the team come up with the idea for the ‘Cadbury Worldwide Hide’?
VCCP London is the agency of record for Cadbury both locally in the UK and centrally with the Global team. So, when Cadbury briefed us in May for their Easter 2021 campaign, they wanted us to come up with a creative way to encourage people to hide eggs and get consumers excited about interacting with loved ones. At the time, the pandemic was constantly changing, and it was looking like we were going to continue to be in lock-down for the foreseeable future, into the Easter season.
We then came up with an idea: wouldn’t it be really cool if somehow you could still hide a real Easter egg for someone you love, but do it virtually. And then once it’s found, that real egg could be delivered to the seeker’s home. With the use of some creativity and technology, we brought this idea to life. The experience we developed allowed our users to purchase a real Cadbury Easter Egg, hide it virtually on the map in a special location, then write the recipient a personalized clue for him to find the egg. Once the seeker found the egg, they would receive a real, physical egg the hider bought for her delivered to her home.
We wanted it to be a truly meaningful one-to-one connection, to bring back some lovely memories for people, and to allow a real chocolate egg to be hidden for a loved one no matter where they were.
Why was this important to Cadbury?
Generosity is at the heart of Cadbury’s brand, and Easter is our opportunity to show that ‘there’s a glass and a half in everyone’. As we enter the second year of our campaign ‘Show you care, hide it’, we are flipping the Easter ritual on its head and showing that the generous act is in hiding an egg for someone you love.
Physical connection has been restricted by the global pandemic and that’s why this year’s Easter campaign sets out to connect people across the UK through the power of generosity.
Tell us a little bit about the technical side of the project. Which Google Maps Platform products did you use to create the user experience?
The Cadbury Worldwide Hide launched across 4 markets (UK, IE, AU, NZ) simultaneously. Integration with regional e-commerce and CRM partners brought the activation into the real world with chocolate eggs being delivered throughout the campaign as seekers found them.
Providing an engaging map experience to our users was key to the execution and by leveraging the Google Maps interface consumers already use on a daily basis, we were able to focus on our core campaign message. We built the platform using both the Maps Javascript API to render the 2D maps and the Street View API, which allowed users to hide their egg anywhere in the world for their loved one to find. We also used Place Autocomplete powered search allowing users to search for their favorite location while contextual hints kept hiders on track. Seekers were aided with a distance meter and hints system if they got stuck. Our Design and Engineering team used Google Maps Platform Cloud-based maps styling to customize the map.
To get the campaign to as many people as possible we prioritized accessibility throughout the site, from screen-reader support and relevant tab indexes through to full keyboard shortcuts within the map experience – allowing users to hide (or find!) their egg without ever using a mouse. Real user testing was done throughout the UX, design and development process to ensure best practices were being followed.
How long did it take the VCCP team to build-out the solution?
Discovery to the roll-out of the solution took about 7 months. Our Design and Engineering team started with a 4-week discovery phase in September 2020 where we developed a service blueprint that set the foundations of the project. By visualizing the entire process of a service from start to finish, listing all the activities that happened at each stage, and the different roles, actions, processes and systems involved, the blueprint allowed all stakeholders to align on the solution.
We started iterative cycles of development in November 2020, beginning with UX (prototype for user testing), UI (look and feel and customization of Google Maps using Cloud-based Maps styling), and then kicked off front end and back end development in December. We launched the Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform in early March 2021—just in time for millions of users around the world to enjoy ahead of Easter.
Did you experience any challenges as you developed the experience?
The biggest challenge was actually around adapting to change in plans in response to the desire to launch the platform across more markets than originally intended. During the development phase, we rapidly scaled up to develop the platform for Ireland, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the UK within the same timeframe.
What results were you able to achieve and how did you measure the success of the project?
One week before Easter Sunday, we had sold out of Cadbury Worldwide Hide chocolate eggs. There were over 2.26 million site visits with an average time spent on the platform of almost five minutes. Over 809k virtual eggs were hidden in total and 14.5k real Cadbury Easter eggs bought. The Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform was the number one Mondelēz International website globally, and a couple even used the platform for a marriage proposal!
Would you recommend this type of campaign and user engagement to other B-to-C brands, if so, why?
Direct to consumer capabilities are increasingly important for brands, particularly in the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) space. Local lockdowns and restrictions on physical retail have accelerated our adoption of ecommerce. Not only have brands had to adapt quickly, but consumers are beginning to expect direct-to-consumer capabilities from their favorite brands. Cadbury recognized this behavior shift early. What the Cadbury Worldwide Hide did well was to innovate beyond the traditional DTC and ecommerce experience by gamifying the platform and enabling moments of human connection at a time when physical connection was impossible.
What advice would you give to other agencies or brands thinking about creating user experiences with Google Maps Platform?
We learned a great deal taking on this project. Here are just a few highlights:
- Assume anything is possible.
- Our ‘Mobile First’ approach allowed consumers to access the platform from any device with consistent, engaging brand experience.
- Think big and beyond the traditional use of Google Maps and treat it as a foundation platform to build upon.
- Prototype and test early to validate your hypotheses. We created a technical proof of concept which enabled us to test using ‘real’ Google Maps and real people early in our design process.
- Don’t assume everything is accessible to everyone. You may need to build upon the ‘out the box’ functionality to ensure as many people as possible can use your solution.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
Explore the Complete Startups’ Technical Guide on Google Cloud Tech Channel
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Bootstrap your Startup with our technical guided series
At Google Cloud, we want to provide you with the access to all the tools you need to grow your business. Through the Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups, leverage industry leading solutions with how-to video guides and resource handbooks curated for startups.
This multi-series contains 3 chapters: Start, Build and Grow, which matches your startup’s stage of growth:
- The Start Series: Begin by building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish.
- The Build Series: Optimize and scale existing deployments to reach your target audiences.
- The Grow Series: Grow and attain scale with deployments on Google Cloud.
Kick off with The Start Series
The Start Series is designed to help your startup begin building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish. The series contains 12 videos and is dedicated to those who are starting out their cloud journey with Google Cloud. From setting up your project, to choosing the right compute option, to configuring your networking to managing your databases, and understanding support and billing – the Start Series guides you at every step of the journey.
Check out our website and our Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups full playlist.
Coming up next – The Build Series
Launch into the next part of the journey continuing from the Start Series, with the upcoming Build Series, where we will be focusing on the optimization and scaling of existing deployments to help your startups reach your target audiences.
Join us by checking out the video series on the Google Cloud Tech channel, and subscribe to stay up to date.
See you in the cloud!
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Organizations need to modernize their applications for a variety of reasons including the need to reduce cost and complexity, increase organizational agility, lower the barrier to innovation, and building new features.
However, lifting critical business technologies off legacy implementations and refactoring them to take advantage of modern technologies and services is a process that takes time and can’t be achieved overnight.
At the same time, as competitors adopt new technologies to streamline processes and attract customers, CIOs are under increased pressure to ensure that their organizations remain competitive by enabling their IT to develop and iterate faster than their competition.
Hence, IT leaders and their teams need to come up with the right game plan, the right foundation, and the right tools for their application modernization journey. They need to create a plan, iterate on it, and keep moving forward.
Download this whitepaper to learn how you can easily modernize your applications for the cloud.
Forrester Research: The Total Economic Impact of SAP on Google Cloud
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Migrating and running SAP on Google Cloud reduces complexity allowing for easier management, improving performance and security, and allowing organizations to better leverage SAP data to drive business outcomes.
Over three years, SAP on Google Cloud reduces costs and improves performance and reliability. Among other benefits, migrating SAP to Google Cloud reduces developer effort associated with updates and releases by 35%, eliminates system downtime saving over $1.5M per year, and eliminates on-premises SAP infrastructure resulting in $7.1M savings over three years.
Download this pathbreaking infographic from Forrester to understand the total economic impact of moving your SAP to Google Cloud.
IBM Spectrum LSF and Google Collab: Leverage Google Cloud’s Scalability and Compute Engine Infrastructure
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High Performance Computing (HPC) is prevalent today across many industries, including financial services, life sciences, higher education research, manufacturing, and energy. More and more businesses are deploying HPC workloads in the cloud to take advantage of its elasticity, scalability, and availability. Job schedulers are critical for HPC applications given the nature of these workloads that create, process, and tear down thousands, and sometimes millions, of vCPU and network resources with TB to PB of storage capacity. Job scheduling tools lead to improved operational efficiency and a degree of certainty that a particular HPC job, which can run for hours to weeks, will complete successfully.
IBM Spectrum LSF is used extensively in the manufacturing and semiconductor industry to manage Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workloads. Dynamically running workloads on-premises and in the cloud, also known as cloud bursting, is becoming a more common practice to address capacity and provisioning time constraints within data centers and enable enterprises to take advantage of virtually unlimited resources.
However, the challenge with cloud bursting is integrating and maintaining operational consistency across on-premises and cloud environments. IBM Spectrum LSF, in combination with Google Cloud, addresses this problem head on.
Google Cloud is excited to announce, in collaboration with IBM, enhanced capabilities to IBM Spectrum LSF that enables organizations to integrate their on-premises job scheduling scripts with resources deployed in Google Cloud. Customers are now able to fully leverage Google Cloud’s highly scalable and secure Compute Engine, networking and storage infrastructure.
The LSF-Google Cloud resource connector patch supports key Google Cloud differentiators including Local SSDs, GCE instance templates, Preemptible VMs, and more:
- Bulk API support– Deploy large fleets of VM instances in a matter of seconds.
- Instance Templates – Simplify VM configuration by creating reusable templates.
- All Machine Types – Supports all GCE VM families and machine types, including Custom Machine Types.
- GPUs – Attach up to 16 GPUs per instance, including the largest A2 instances with up to 16 NVIDIA A100 GPUs
- Preemptible VMs – Preemptible VMs are provisioned from excess Compute Engine capacity and is a significant way to save money on GCE resources.
- Local SSD – Attach up to 9TB of NVMe SSD per instance
- Hyperthreading – Supports the “threads-per-core” option in GCE, which allows per-VM hypervisor level Hyperthread configuration (when supported by Instance Templates)
- Images – Supports custom disk images, including full support for Windows, for all attached Persistent Disks
- Placement Policies – Control where the instances are physically located relative to each other within a zone for improved low-latency performance
- Labels – Supports GCE Labels, which can be used for management of firewall rules, tracking billing, etc
- Minimum CPU Platform – Supports the ability to specify a minimum CPU Platform for your Virtual Machines.
Getting Started
This improvement to the IBM LSF Resource Connector was developed by IBM in coordination with Google. Find out more about the new supported features and their operation in the official IBM Spectrum LSF Resource Connector Documentation. You can also find additional documentation and download the software in the IBM Spectrum Computing Community. If you have further questions, you can contact IBM, or Google Cloud Sales.
Special thanks to Annie Ma-Weaver, Mark Mims, and Wyatt Gorman for their contributions.
G R Infraprojects Limited Turns to Google Cloud to Run Business-Critical SAP S/4HANA
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Road construction is booming in India. A recent report prepared by the India Brand Equity Foundation—a trust established by the Department of Commerce—pointed out that in FY 2019 alone, the country added 10,855 kilometers of highways to a road network that spans 5.89 million kilometers. This network is the second largest in the world and transports 90% of passenger traffic and 64.5% of all goods in the country.
The Indian Government has also earmarked road construction as key to plans to increase the nation’s GDP to $5 trillion in coming years, targeting road construction worth $212.8 billion in the two years from April 2020.
G R Infraprojects Limited is well positioned to support the government’s program. The business, which started as a contractor building roads in rural villages in India, now specializes in road engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), a model whereby private construction firms build roads funded by the government.
The business now undertakes the processing of bitumen, manufacture of thermoplastic road-marking paint and road signage, and fabrication and galvanizing road-crash barriers. Its in-house integration model includes a design and engineering team, as well as manufacturing facilities in Rajasthan, Assam, and Gujarat.
The business recently expanded into rail—another area expected to benefit from extensive government investment—with its competencies including earthworks, materials supply, track lining, and bridge construction.
In this environment—and despite the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic—G R Infraprojects Limited aims to substantially increase turnover and manpower over the next five years.
Best-in-class infrastructure key to success
Digital transformation is key to enabling growth while best-in-class IT infrastructure is one of the foundations on which the business seeks to build success.
G R Infraprojects Limited’s digital initiatives include deployment of a new document management system and corporate systems that enable remote monitoring, live tracking, effective real-time communication, and efficient data management.
Providing a scalable, reliable cost-effective infrastructure
But most important of all is providing a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure to support a business-critical SAP enterprise resource planning system. Over the last few years, versions of SAP have enabled the organization to digitize processes and seamlessly run business-critical functions such as inventory management and finance.
G R Infraprojects Limited initially went live with SAP ECC6.0, with a few hundred team members using the system for business-critical tasks such as tracking stock level and movement and generating financial statements and reports for review and action.
“Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Lowering maintenance costs
However, as G R Infraprojects Limited grew, projects proliferated, and new markets emerged, the business elected to move to the cloud from an on-premises infrastructure. “We wanted to move because there were so many maintenance costs in on-premises solutions and cloud provided convenience to IT and the broader organization,” explains Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation at G R Infraprojects Limited.
The business also wanted to move to SAP S/4HANA to take advantage of features such as AI, advanced analytics, and machine learning to transform business processes. The system runs on the HANA database, an in-memory database with fast processing speeds and a simplified data model.
G R Infraprojects Limited selected Google Cloud to run SAP S/4HANA because, Sachin says, it is “much better than any other platform,” incorporates a wide range of features, and meets uptime requirements. The cloud service could also scale to support forecast growth without a sharp increase in cost.
Furthermore, Sachin adds, “Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”
“With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day. With such a scalable and dynamic platform, we are very happy with the performance.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Successful transition with Infrabeat
G R Infraprojects Limited completed the project with assistance from partner InfraBeat over three months and SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud went live mid-2019. “Our dedicated SAP team worked closely with Infrabeat to deliver the project successfully,” says Sachin. “We needed an experienced partner to assist with the implementation process and Infrabeat performed that role admirably. Both teams supported each other and worked to plan to deliver a great result.”
SAP S/4HANA runs on an infrastructure comprising virtual machine instances delivered through Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud NAT to enable the secure transmission and receipt of packets to and from the internet.
G R Infraprojects Limited estimates the cost of running SAP S/4 HANA in Google Cloud is significantly lower than on alternative infrastructure options—freeing up budget for other business priorities.
In addition, moving SAP S/4 HANA to infrastructure as a service through Google Cloud has eliminated the need to assign internal team members to infrastructure management, allowing them instead to focus on higher-value activities.
Google Cloud also incorporates the security needed to protect the data and processes of SAP S/4 HANA from intrusion or disruption and ensure the uptime and continuity required of a business-critical system.
Optimized speed and availability
G R Infraprojects Limited’s decision to run SAP S/4 HANA on Google Cloud is delivering benefits on a daily basis. “With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day,” says Sachin. “We are very happy with the performance.”
Success with SAP S/4HANA has helped the business decide to move its remaining apps and data to the cloud when its on-premises servers and other equipment reach end of life. G R Infraprojects Limited is already running Active Directory in Google Cloud and Sachin says the cloud platform’s “fast and excellent services” made the decision easy.
“There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Adding value
As G R Infraprojects Limited grows, Sachin adds, the business expects Google Cloud to continue to add value. “There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”
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