The theme of reuniting people with their loved ones has been successfully employed by a number of brands, including Baileys with its ‘Bring You Home’ project and Nivea’s New Year’s Eve promotion, to name a few. Now, the concept has become the basis for a series of Cadbury’s promotions: while bringing together the nation through the Spots v Stripes campaign in the U.K., the chocolate brand is also reconnecting Aussie families in the new promotional program dubbed ‘The Cadbury Catch Up,’ developed by the Saatchi & Saatchi agency and launched on February, 13.

“Australians now spend more than 8hrs a month on social networking sites. Do you think we should set more time aside for genuine catch ups?” asks the brand in its Twitter feed. Today, personal communication within families is put in peril since children are spending much more time chatting with their buddies online than talking with parents, and husbands pay more attention to sport programs than to their wives, who are, in their turn, watching endless TV shows. With the new promotion, Cadbury Australia is asking consumers to commit to a real time, face-to-face catch up and put aside the entertainment provided by the modern technology.

Saatchi & Saatchi says, “As we all know, technology tends to get in the way of people getting together face-to-face these days. Having a chat together is now seemingly on the endangered list. So we created The Cadbury Catch Up to encourage people to switch off and catch up over some Cadbury Dairy Milk.”

To spread the message, the brand started a television campaign, which included slow motion adverts highlighting the moments of reconnecting family members and launched a promotion on its website. In the commercials, a son is pulling out his ear phones to catch up with his mum and a husband forgets about his remote and turns to his wife to spend all his free time with her instead of watching another football match. In the end, the happy families are enjoying a block of Cadbury Dairy Milk together.

Buying a specially marked pack of chocolate from any participating outlet, consumers can participate in the program and share the joy with their loved ones. If the code on the pack is the winner (to find it out, they should enter it on the website), the they can use it to mail a 200 g chocolate block of Cadbury Dairy Milk along with a personalized note to their family or friends.

Kirstin Stapleberg, marketing manager at Cadbury Dairy Milk, commented, “We believe this is such a powerful campaign because it speaks to a very real human truth—that despite the hectic nature of family life these days Australians do want to spend more quality time together. That’s what this campaign is all about—turning off the TV, iPhone, e-mail and twitter and rediscovering the simple pleasure of catching up with someone in person and in the same room.”