Nutella's Spread The Happy Series

The Spread the Happy Series is an episodic, multi-season digital series created to influence the act of sharing joy, love and happiness. Each episode features a different character study of someone who embodies the idea of spreading happiness, whether it be through their own remarkable talents, their joyful spirit or their acts of kindness. The stories range in scale from elaborate clean-up projects to simple schoolyard friendships. The goal of the series is to showcase the universal language of happiness and that it can be contagious.

The series features relatable stories of simple truths that reflect our potential to spread happiness to one another. We believe in marketing that has the ability to not only raise a brand’s financial value, but raise its human value as well by touching and moving people along the way. For us, brand value needs to be measured by more than just sales and statistics; it should also reflect the value brands bring to people’s lives and the communities they live in. With this strategy and outlook, we were able to counteract negative online sentiment and drive fandom for Nutella.

Our challenge was to make the brand culturally relevant and use the positivity of the brand’s ‘Spread the Happy’ positioning to rise above negative brand sentiment by engaging and entertaining the audience with positive stories of spreading happiness.

In its first month of airing, the Spread the Happy Series received over 65 million views, earned over 100 million impressions, was featured on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and the Nutella brand saw an increase in year-over-year sales of over 18%. The campaign successfully rose above negative online sentiment through tremendous, positive and organic engagement across all social and digital platforms.

The series garnered national media attention and earned its place among the advertising and entertainment elite, winning numerous awards and premiering both seasons at the Tribeca Film Festival.

BPS introduced, negotiated and executed partnerships on behalf of the series, including:

  • The Ellen Degeneres Show

  • Echosmith STH Episode

  • Tribeca Film Festival (2017 & 2018)

Nutella Originals: Spread the Happy generated over 12 million social actions.

  • The media campaign over-delivered across all KPIs with 6x the benchmark on CTR and CPV below $0.03.  

  • The campaign also saw over 100 million earned media impressions and featured live social content starring the band Echosmith, who helped to more than double organic video views.

  • The partnership with The Ellen DeGeneres Show added over 30 million views, over 12 million additional impressions and over 500k social actions.

  • The series helped drive an 18% increase in year-over-year sales.

  • This series sparked social awareness and brought the Nutella brand to the forefront of the cultural conversation and fought against the brand’s negative PR.

  • According to Tubular Labs video analysis, Nutella Originals: Spread the Happy maintained a significantly higher engagement rate than Starbucks’ Upstanders.

Media campaign generated over 21 million video views alone.

  • Videos exceeded benchmarks across the board for KPIs from clicks, shares, comments, likes, engagement, views, video completion, etc.

  • Video completion rate was 2% above benchmarks, effective cost-per-view stayed below $0.03 and click-through rate was 6.3X above benchmarks.

  • We saw a large amount of over-delivery, both on Facebook and Instagram. The long-form videos on Facebook alone drove more than 7 million views.

The partnership with The Ellen DeGeneres Show added over 31 million views across digital and on-air.

  • Additional 12 million impressions across Ellen social platforms

  • Over 500K social actions across Ellen social platforms

  • Over 70K contest applicants on Ellen’s website and Facebook page

PR Highlights:

  • Earned Media Impressions: 109,880,067

  • Social Reach of Facebook Lives: 16,450,613

  • Media Day more than doubled Echosmith video views on YouTube and organic video views on Facebook during that week.

  • Revealed first video with top tier trade exclusive and announced the series via press release, resulting in more than 95,800,000 traditional media impressions.

Echosmith Partnership:

  • Echosmith media day included six Facebook live interviews that resulted in a total of 186,000+ views.

  • The interviews increased the Echosmith video views  on YouTube by 127%, sustaining a continued flow of traffic for a few days and more than doubled organic video views on Facebook.

  • Distractify & Seventeen were the most-watched interviews.

  • Additional 13,700,000 earned media impressions secured, highlighting Nutella messaging.