Lacta, The Taste of Love

Background

Over the last ten years, Lacta chocolate has established a tradition of long-form storytelling around its core proposition that people share love when they share Lacta.

In 2018, they moved the idea forward with a 73-minute sci-fi love story, ‘The Taste of Love’, which was released on Valentine’s Day.

To create anticipation for the film, a teaser campaign was devised to help users collectively answer, "What is love?" using Artificial Intelligence.

Idea

The film told the story of lonely 48-year old Yaris, living with ELLi, a beautiful robot, who can predict and satisfy his every wish. To be the perfect personal assistant, she uses AI and has access to all his data. One day, her operating system is accidentally updated with ‘artificial emotions’ and now she begins to feel neglected by Yaris. She wants to know about love but Aris dismisses her, telling her that love is the worst thing that can happen to man. However, when she presents him with a bar of Lacta chocolate and asks him to describe its taste, since she cannot eat, he succumbs and starts telling her a story that began 20 years ago, in Athens in 2018... The teaser campaign put AI to work, combining real-time data with the advertising. ELLi knew all about the viewer, what sort of device they were watching on, what the weather was like, but she didn’t know what love is.

Viewers were directed to http://thetasteoflove.gr where, to help her, they could submit a photo that captured love for them.

Then, using real Artificial Intelligence in cooperation with Google, the website was able to recognize what was portrayed in each photo. Using machine learning, the data was organised to allow users to dive into ELLi's mind to discover what she was learning in real time. In a 3D interactive environment, users could discover patterns and common threads about what love means to all human beings.

Results

Over 10,000 submissions were made to try to answer the question, ‘What is Love?’. The algorithm made headline news with its distillation of all these ideas about love.

When the film was launched on February 14th, it became a trending video instantly, gathering more than 2.5 million views in a country with a population of 5 million. ‘Lacta’ keyword searches on Google increased by 1,460% and became one of the top 20 keywords searched on YouTube.

Lacta obtained its largest share of the chocolate market in Greece for three years.

Our Thoughts

Way back in 2010, I first expressed admiration for the pioneering work OgilvyOne were doing for Lacta. Since then multiple campaigns have developed the theme and have also provided hard evidence that branded content works.

As I like to say repeatedly, people don’t hate advertising. They hate BAD advertising.

So when they get captivated by an idea like this, not only do recall levels rise significantly but so too do sales. Work that works, don’t you just love it?

Reaching out to my former colleagues in The Zoo at Google EMEA was smart. Andreas Mielenhausen is something of an expert in contextual communications (see ‘4Matic Book’ in Directory 43) and his work, blending real time data into personalised ads, has turned this idea from being about AI into a fun demonstration of it.