Cadbury 5-star chocolate is well-known for its famous tagline "Eat 5 Star. Do Nothing". While most brands and celebrities urge their viewers to 'do' things, 5 Star has been championing the idea that sometimes the best thing one can do is nothing. This counter-culture stance has gained a lot of popularity over the years.

Owing to lock-downs across the country, sales of the chocolate took a hit in 2021. Our task was to address the decline, while building on the brand's unique and popular positioning.

While money has always been earned by working, we created the first ever digital coin that can only be mined by doing the opposite of work- nothing.

All one has to do is scan the wrapper's QR code, sit down and do nothing. A mobile microsite then measures the user’s inactivity, and rewards them with nothingcoins for every minute that they spend doing nothing.

The ‘mining’ session ends the moment the user checks social media, gets up or uses their phone. We then built an actual physical bank in Mumbai’s banking district - a bank where one just can sit on a chair, do nothing, and mine nothingcoins.

The nothingcoin bank parodies everything you’d expect to see in a bank, from ‘loan’ counters to ATMs. We took the madness even further by getting India’s largest payment gateway to accept Nothingcoin as payment, by projecting a message on their office building.

The target audience for 5-Star chocolate is primarily 18-25. In 2021, the cryptocurrency-craze spread like wildfire in India, with millions of people investing heavily in bitcoin.

The investors were predominantly from younger generations and matched our target group. Cryptos were in the news every single day, owing to new crypto platforms launching every month, the Indian government contemplating a complete ban, and influencers becoming millionaires overnight.

Memecoins like doge-coin had started entering the conversation, so we seized to opportunity to ride with crypto-wave in a uniquely “5-Star” way.

5-Star ads had already been attributing great value to "doing nothing", so we took it a step further by giving it REAL value - we turned “nothing” into a currency. Customers were compelled to pick up 5 Stars to check out this new currency, and this allowed us to reverse the recent dip in sales.

The mining app is a mobile microsite that accesses the phone's accelerometer and usage information to measure the user's inactivity. Through an Instagram poll, we asked miners to choose the platform they’d like to spend their nothingcoins on, and then followed up on their answer in the most dramatic way.

We projected an appeal in front of the head office of India’s largest payment portal, and within 48 hours, they added Nothingcoin as a payment option, offering miners access to over 20 million merchants!

We even built a physical bank in Mumbai's prime banking district, complete with ATMs, loan counters and everything you'd expect to find in a bank.

The social media buzz around Nothingcoin was unprecedented, and we amplified it further with timely responses on social media - be it to crypto exchanges tweeting about nothingcoin, or to the Indian Government’s proposal to tax cryptocurrencies.

RESULTS: Within weeks, users armed with 5-Stars spent over 4.4 million minutes doing nothing and mined over 6.5 million nothingcoins. Products worth $30,000 were purchased using this currency, on various websites.

The wackiness of the idea took social media by storm, bringing the campaign 1.2 billion impressions, 200+ earned media placements, and even tweets from CEOs of top crypto exchanges. Nothingcoin made it to the news in almost every top news network in India, and even top financial news channels and websites couldn’t resist mentioning it.

It became the subject of hundreds of social media posts, memes and videos by crypto-enthusiasts and influencers.

Pack sales went up by 29% within this short period, and the QR-code engagement on the pack was 1100% more successful than any cashback promotion. Spont and Consideration scores increased by 4pp and 5pp respectively.