The Willy Wonka / Golden Ticket Trick

In 1964, Road Dahl published a book that would become extremely popular : Charlie and the chocolate factory.
With Tim Burton's 2005 adaptation, the book became a movie and was made even more popular. But, farther than this, it has created an amazingly marketable tool : the golden ticket.

The principle of the golden ticket trick, also known as the Willy Wonka Trick consists in hidding in your products one or several golden tickets (that can also take other names) and associating a reward to the finding of these tickets. This very viral recipe will conclude in your customers' frantic quest for the tickets, so that they can win those precious prizes.

Today, an article to compare two recent campaigns using this golden ticket trick.

Nestlé - We will find you

In September 2012, Nestlé launched the operation "We Will Find you"

Nestlé's "We Will Find You"

The principle :
Hide a GPS inside 6 chocolate bars
Once this chocolate bar is found, the GPS is activated, and the winner receives 10 000£.

The communication relays:
• Video, as seen above
• Product packaging

• "Classic" advertising on bus stops

What was most interesting as we can see on this ad was the use of NFC. Thanks to the scanning of the QR Code / use of NFC tags, you could enter the competitions and see how many tags were left !

This campaign was very well relayed by numerous websites, french as english, so I will not extend upon it.

Instead, I would like to introduce another brand's perhaps less well known use of the golden ticket trick.

Michel et Augustin

Michel et Augustin is a french patisserie brands on which I have already written an article here. I had presented very briefly the principle of the four golden cows (les "4 vaches en or") and have decided to go more in depth here.

Michel et augustin's Four Golden Cows

The principle : make the consumers and internet users search for the four golden cows. They could be won :
- When buying a giant cookie (Cookie des rois)
- When finding the cow on the website
- By winning the lotery on their site (lotery to which 8 970 people registered)
- "Somewhere in France"
Today there still remains one ticket to be found in the giant cookie, finding which will close the contest !
During the first edition of the contest, I had observed the competition, and quite a lot of people where very active on the facebook page of the brand, relating which pages the golden cow could not be found on. But it took quite a while finding the cow, given that the Michel et Augustin team would have hidden it in a remote corner of their website.

The communication relays :
• The picture above is the homepage of their website
• This picture is relayed on their Facebook page, with the following cover picture

• "Classic" Advertising (Aix en Provence, Angers, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lyon, Nancy, Pau...)

Michel et Augustin advertising for "4 vaches en Or" in Clermont-Ferrand

In conclusion, a very interactive, and rather low-cost viral strategy. 

One last piece of advice : do not hesitate in making teasers of this kind of campaign, behind-the-scenes videos, making-offs... They will only increase the virality of the operation ! The key success factor being of course the virality of the operation. Two main KPI (key performance indicators) for this type of campaign : the number of incremental products sold, and of course the incremental augmentation of the social media used to relay the campaign with.

For now, the golden ticket trick has mainly been applied to the domain of sweets, candy and other delicious things. What could be most interesting would be to see another kind of brand use this technique : luxury for example.

And you, what are your favourite golden tickets campaigns ?