"Pure Hershey's"

Hershey this week began airing a TV spot that marks the beginning of its "Pure Hershey's" campaign, which hopes to associate the candy maker's chocolate with feelings of happiness, innocence and simplicity.

The spots for Hershey's Chocolate Bar eventually will become an umbrella campaign for the company's other top brands, targeting a demographic of 18- to 34-year-olds. The first 30- and 15-second ads, via Arnold NYC, will run next quarter and into 2009—all aiming to connect Hershey's chocolate with various pleasant emotions.

The current spot is the work of Wallace & Gromit creators Aardman Animations. It takes viewers inside a Hershey's candy bar that melts into an animated scene of a girl on a swing, which morphs into another scene showing the girl and her boyfriend driving in a chocolate convertible. Chocolate bunnies chase the couple as they ride into the sunset and "I Melt With You" by Modern English provides background music. A female voiceover asks: "What Makes a Hershey's bar pure?" She then answers: "pure simplicity," "pure happiness," "pure delicious."

"The snacking universe has gotten so much bigger and varied and the thing about a Hershey's bar is if you try to line up the attributes on a rational level—ingredients to ingredients—you're going to come up short unless we can make something out of that," said John Staffen, Arnold NYC's chief creative officer. "The emotional ingredients that go into a Hershey's bar are what the campaign tries to play up."