Easter Egg for Easter

Cooking habits are changing: in Russia, people are preparing fewer homemade meals, especially complex baked goods. For Dr. Bakers, a leading baking ingredients producer, this trend highlighted the need to explore new digital growth opportunities and experiment with innovative forms of audience interaction.

In 2025, Easter offered a unique cultural occasion to reignite interest in the baking category and reinforce brand relevance as it is one of the few holidays in Russia when homemade baked goods are still a tradition at the family table. Rather than depend on predictable mechanics, the challenge was to craft a campaign that seamlessly integrated into the seasonal tradition and leveraged SMM and digital platforms as active engagement tools. The media task was straightforward: build engagement across social media and drive traffic to the Easter recipe section of the brand’s website, ensuring digital channels worked as immersive brand experiences.

We aimed to build a strategy where Dr. Bakers would become part of the consumer’s digital journey, turning the website into the main channel of engagement rather than just a recipe archive. The core insight was simple: conventional contests with obvious rules no longer capture attention. Our solution was to invert the mechanic — hiding the key contest element exactly where deeper engagement was needed.

Instead of standard mechanics, we chose an experiment — an SMM photo contest without its main element: the participation hashtag. It was hidden as an Easter egg with a “secret ingredient” among the brand’s Easter recipes. Users had to search through the content, extending time on site and strengthening brand connection. The website became an interactive media channel, while the search itself turned into a playful brand experience.

This unconventional approach proved highly effective: >15 000 000 OTS, threefold increase in website visits during Easter (304 581 website visits in 2025 versus 114 445 website visits in 2024 according to Yandex.Metrics), and generated 400+ contest submissions made with Dr. Bakers’ products and the one ingredient that matters most — #LoveInside.