Lacta 5Star's 2018 animated campaign by Wieden + Kennedy São Paulo dramatises a chocolate world destroyed by wafer and caramel — six surreal spots built for
ARCHIVELacta 5Star Turns Chocolate Destruction Into a Creative Platform
Lacta 5Star's 2018 animated campaign, created by Wieden + Kennedy São Paulo with animation studio Lobo, dramatises the bar's combination of chocolate, caramel, and crunchy wafer by constructing a fantastical miniature world — then systematically obliterating it. Published in Brazil in October 2018, the campaign comprises six animated spots depicting scenarios including a City of Chocolate, a Rock Paper Scissors tournament, an astronaut adrift in space, a ski descent, and further product-driven catastrophes, each ending with the bar's own ingredients wreaking surreal, darkly comic destruction on the chocolate inhabitants within.
The campaign operates as a unified creative platform rather than a collection of isolated executions. Each spot shares the same imaginative premise: tiny chocolate people inhabit a richly detailed world constructed entirely from confectionery, only to be undone by the very elements — wafer fragments, caramel flows, chocolate shards — that define the Lacta 5Star bar itself. The destruction is the product demonstration. This structural conceit allowed Wieden + Kennedy to communicate the bar's multi-texture sensory experience without resorting to conventional snack advertising tropes: no slow-motion pour shots, no testimonials, no appetite-appeal close-ups. Instead, the campaign leans into dark humour and animation craft to make the product's ingredients feel genuinely overwhelming.
The campaign was produced and published in Brazil, one of the most competitive confectionery markets in Latin America, where Lacta — owned by Mondelez International — held a commanding position among chocolate tablet and candy bar consumers. As reported by The Drum on 12 October 2018, the campaign attracted international creative attention precisely because its strategic logic and execution were so tightly unified. With a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100, the work is recognised as a confident, craft-led platform that prioritises imaginative distinctiveness over conventional persuasion mechanics.
ARCHIVELacta holds a dominant position in the Brazilian confectionery market. According to LinkedIn industry data, the brand commanded approximately 37% market share in Brazil during the 2016 to 2018 period, spanning tablets, candy bars, wafers, and seasonal lines. That scale creates a specific strategic challenge: how does a market leader in a mature category maintain creative distinction when most consumers already know the product? The answer Wieden + Kennedy reached was not to sell familiarity but to dramatise intensity.
The 2018 Lacta 5Star campaign was built around a platform of sensory overload and dark humour, as documented on Wieden + Kennedy's own work page. Rather than positioning the bar's combination of chocolate, caramel, and crunchy wafer as a harmonious blend — the default language of confectionery advertising — the creative strategy reframes those same ingredients as genuinely destructive forces. The City of Chocolate scenario, the Rock Paper Scissors conceit, and the astronaut and ski executions all share this logic: the world is beautiful, the ingredients are irresistible, and the collision between the two is inevitable and violent. That tension is the brand story.
In Brazil, the broader confectionery category was growing but competitive. Global confectionery reached approximately US$168.6 billion in 2018, growing at a compound annual growth rate of around 4.1% from 2014 to 2018, according to News Market Us. Within that landscape, Lacta's principal competitors include Nestlé's Kit Kat — which also competes in the wafer-chocolate combination segment — and Ferrero's portfolio of premium chocolate products, both of which were active in the Brazilian market at the time. Against that backdrop, Lacta 5Star's decision to pursue surreal animation rather than appetite-driven live action was a deliberate act of category differentiation.
Directors Mateus de Paula Santos and Nando Cohen led the animated production for the Lacta 5Star campaign at animation studio Lobo, working in collaboration with Wieden + Kennedy São Paulo. The choice of Lobo — a São Paulo-based studio with an established international reputation for character-driven animation — was itself a strategic creative decision. The campaign required a visual world coherent enough to feel genuinely inhabited and detailed enough to make the destruction emotionally legible, even comic. That demanded animation craft of a specific order: not the flat, graphic style common in digital snack advertising, but dimensional, textured character work that made the chocolate world feel real before it was torn apart.
Each of the six animated spots constructs a distinct scenario while maintaining a unified aesthetic and tonal register. The City of Chocolate execution builds an entire urban landscape from confectionery architecture. The Rock Paper Scissors spot turns a playground game into a civilisational ritual among chocolate figures. The astronaut scenario places a chocolate character in deep space, isolated and vulnerable. The ski execution sets destruction against a snow-and-chocolate mountain landscape. Across all executions, the production design ensures that the ingredients of the Lacta 5Star bar — caramel, wafer, chocolate — function as the antagonist forces, arriving with the visual weight and consequence of a natural disaster. The tonal register throughout is darkly comic rather than threatening: the destruction is spectacular, not cruel.
As covered by The Drum on 12 October 2018, the campaign's creative approach distinguished it from conventional confectionery advertising in Brazil and internationally by committing fully to the animated world's internal logic. The campaign does not break frame to show the actual bar or reassure the viewer. The product demonstration is entirely embedded in the narrative destruction, which is a formally ambitious choice for a snack brand operating in a category where purchase decisions are often impulsive and habitual.
No independently verified audience reach or sales performance data for the Lacta 5Star 2018 campaign is publicly available beyond editorial coverage. The Drum's coverage on 12 October 2018 documented the campaign's international creative attention at the time of publication, and the work appears on Wieden + Kennedy's official portfolio, indicating the agency considers it representative of their creative output for the Brazilian market. The campaign's archive entry on Clapboard documents five media assets, while Wieden + Kennedy's own work page and reporting by The Drum reference six animated spots.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several characteristics associated with high creative effectiveness in the confectionery and snacks category. The use of a unified platform across six executions — each built on the same destructive premise but deployed in distinct scenarios including Rock Paper Scissors, City of Chocolate, ski, and astronaut — creates the kind of cumulative brand recognition that single-execution campaigns cannot achieve. The animation craft supplied by Lobo supports emotional engagement across repeated viewings, which is a meaningful advantage in a digital distribution environment where consumers control exposure. The dark humour register also occupies a distinct tonal space in Brazilian confectionery advertising, reducing direct competition for audience attention with more conventional appetite-appeal campaigns from rivals such as Nestlé and Ferrero.
Lacta 5Star earns a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine creative ambition and formal coherence while acknowledging that without verified performance data, the full commercial effectiveness of the work cannot be assessed. The platform's structural logic — destruction as product demonstration — remains one of the more formally inventive approaches to confectionery advertising produced in Brazil in 2018.
The Lacta 5Star campaign is a series of six animated spots created by Wieden + Kennedy São Paulo and animation studio Lobo, published in Brazil in October 2018. Each spot builds a fantastical chocolate world — including a City of Chocolate and an astronaut scenario — then destroys it with the bar's own wafer, caramel, and chocolate ingredients.
Directors Mateus de Paula Santos and Nando Cohen directed the Lacta 5Star animated campaign at Lobo studio. The production was developed with Wieden + Kennedy São Paulo and published in Brazil in October 2018, with The Drum covering the campaign's release on 12 October 2018.
Wieden + Kennedy chose animation to dramatise the bar's ingredients as genuinely destructive forces rather than harmonious flavours. Animation studio Lobo supplied the dimensional character craft needed to make the chocolate world feel real before its destruction, separating the campaign from conventional live-action confectionery advertising in the Brazilian market.
The Lacta 5Star campaign includes six animated scenarios: City of Chocolate, Rock Paper Scissors, an astronaut in space, a ski descent, and further product-driven destruction sequences. Each builds a distinct world from confectionery architecture before the bar's own wafer, caramel, and chocolate ingredients destroy the chocolate inhabitants within.
Lacta, owned by Mondelez International, held approximately 37% market share in Brazil during 2016 to 2018, according to LinkedIn industry data. The brand spans tablets, candy bars, wafers, and seasonal confectionery lines, making it the dominant chocolate brand in the Brazilian market at the time of the 2018 campaign.
The Lacta 5Star 2018 campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100. The score recognises the campaign's creative ambition and formal coherence — particularly its use of destruction as product demonstration across six animated spots — while reflecting the absence of publicly verified commercial performance data.
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