It's All Cake: 4Creative's Great British Bake Off Campaign

The Great British Bake Off is a highly popular reality-TV show in the UK featuring some of the best bakers in Britain. To create excitement for the show's twelfth season, 4Creative launched an ad campaign that implemented the use of the out-of-home medium. The intent behind the campaign was to turn “everything into a cake.” By using different forms of media and technology, 4Creative turned buildings, people, and places into cake to capitalize on the current internet trend of baking lifelike items into cakes. The biggest form of this method, both figuratively and literally, was the transformation of a 78ft tall building into a cake. The building was wrapped in photorealistic images of a giant sheet cake, and had trim placed along the top to look like pink icing. The look was completed with a 23ft long giant fork constructed and placed on the street next to the building. Such a bold form of advertising was all a part of a plan to create something that was more than just an ad. 

To further drive home the message that ”everything was a cake” the agency creatively used technology. Digital media boards were programmed to intuitively react to local weather in a Great British Bake Off manner. For example, these reactive adverts would change from a blue sky with a lemon tart sun and meringue clouds to a grey sky raining colorful candies to “sweeten the changing British weather.” Alongside these billboards, an AR lens was released on Snapchat and Instagram allowing people to get in on the fun and turn themselves into cake. This was a part of the social push of the campaign in which they reached influences in order to target younger audiences. Overall, all of these strategies combined to garner online shares, and vast media attention, and led to the first episode of the new season having an audience that almost equaled audiences during peak lockdown.