Cadbury’s Gorilla- 12th Anniversary

Today marks 12 years since the famous Gorilla ad for Cadbury Dairy Milk was first aired.

Some fun stuff about the ad:

• It was first aired during the 2007 finale of Big Brother (UK).
• The same day it was uploaded on YouTube, and received 500,000 views within a week.  The original upload is still there on YouTube and that alone has over 9 million views.
• By some accounts, over 70 Facebook groups came up, in appreciation of the ad, and over 300 spoof versions of the ad have been posted online.
• Probably the most talked-about parody of the ad was by Wonderbra, which Adweek described as an attempt “to improve on the original by featuring a much less hairy drummer and lots of gratuitous boob-bouncing.”
• The gorilla suit, procured from Hollywood, was operated by three people- one inside, and two remotely.
• When asked about the gorilla, Collins jokingly commented: “Not only is he a better drummer than me, he also has more hair.”
• Cadbury World, Birmingham, features an animatronic version of the gorilla.
• The ad was instrumental in reversing a 3 year decline in sales of Cadbury Daily Milk in the UK.  The year leading to the ad had been marked by, among other things, product contamination, that forced Cadbury Schweppes to recall more than 1 million of its chocolate bars at a cost of over £20 million.
• In 2015, readers of Marketing magazine voted it as their most favourite ad of all time in the UK.