HARIBO Fishing Brings Kids Voices Back to the Scottish Highlands

Why Kids Voices Still Works as a Strategic Platform for HARIBO in the UK

HARIBO holds the position of market leader in UK sugar confectionery. That leadership creates a specific strategic obligation: the brand must defend salience and emotional distinctiveness rather than simply explain a product proposition. 'Kids Voices' was built to do exactly that, and its durability over ten years reflects how precisely the original insight was articulated.

The insight is deceptively simple. HARIBO sweets produce a reaction in adults that bypasses social conditioning and briefly restores something childlike. The campaign does not animate that insight through nostalgia or sentimentality — it dramatises it literally, giving adult bodies the inner voice of children. Trevor Robinson OBE, founder and Executive Creative Director of Quiet Storm, has described the campaign's continued relevance in direct terms, telling The Drum that 'Kids Voices' is now ten years old but 'still goes from strength to strength, proving how strong the original insight and idea are.'

In the United Kingdom, the sugar confectionery category operates in a competitive environment that includes rivals such as Maynards Bassetts and Rowntree's, both of which have invested in emotionally driven UK advertising. Against that landscape, HARIBO's consistent ownership of a single tonal territory — uninhibited, child-anchored joy — functions as a meaningful competitive barrier. According to Mintel, sugar confectionery remains a resilient impulse category in the UK, with product familiarity and brand affinity driving repeat purchase. 'Fishing' reinforces both through a format that UK audiences have encountered across ten years and eleven executions, generating recognition that compounds with each new instalment rather than resetting it. The gap since 'Police' in 2020, noted by The Drum, makes 'Fishing' a reactivation as much as a continuation — reminding UK viewers that the voice they remember still belongs to HARIBO.

Seb Jamous and Trevor Robinson Craft a Scottish Loch Setpiece for HARIBO's Kids Voices

Quiet Storm created, produced, and directed 'Fishing' entirely in-house, a structural decision that reflects both the agency's production capability and the intimacy required to execute 'Kids Voices' with precision. Creative Director Seb Jamous directed the film and co-wrote it alongside Trevor Robinson OBE, the agency's founder — a collaboration that keeps the campaign's authorship tightly concentrated across its decade-long run.

The Scottish Highlands location is doing significant creative work. Most 'Kids Voices' executions have placed adults in social or professional settings — a boardroom, a police station — where the gap between the environment's formality and the children's inner dialogue is the primary source of comic tension. 'Fishing' preserves that structure but relocates it to an elemental, unhurried landscape where silence and stillness are the baseline. Two men on a loch with nothing biting is not an inherently funny situation; the comedy arrives entirely through voice and expression, which places exceptional demands on the performers and the direction. The restraint required to let a line like 'fishes like shiny' land without underlining it is a craft decision as much as a comedic one.

The product integration is unusually layered for the format. Three distinct HARIBO products — Starmix, Happy-Cola, and Goldbears — each generate a separate beat within a single, compact narrative. Happy-Cola earns its moment through the fisherman's logic-chain about bait; the Goldbears earn theirs through the Loch Ness reference, a piece of Scottish cultural specificity that roots the ad firmly in its setting. The Drum, in its Best Ads of the Week selection on 6 March 2024, highlighted the contrast between the fishermen's rugged appearance and their childlike dialogue as the ad's defining creative achievement. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100, reflecting strong creative craft and platform consistency.

HARIBO Fishing Results and the Decade-Long Impact of Kids Voices in the UK

No independently verified post-campaign performance metrics for 'Fishing' are publicly available at the time of writing. The assessment that follows draws on structural evidence and documented reception rather than unpublished proprietary data.

The Drum selected 'Fishing' for its Best Ads of the Week feature on 6 March 2024, two days after the campaign broke, representing one of the faster critical endorsements the 'Kids Voices' platform has received on a per-instalment basis. That selection reflects the ad's immediate legibility — the format is sufficiently established that audiences and critics can evaluate a new execution against an existing standard, which accelerates both recognition and opinion formation.

The platform's structural effectiveness is measurable through longevity alone. According to System1 Group, emotional response in advertising is the primary driver of long-term brand effects, and campaigns that sustain a consistent emotional register across multiple years compound their impact with each new execution. 'Kids Voices' has now produced eleven UK executions across ten years, with each instalment reinforcing the same tonal signature while introducing a new narrative context. 'Fishing' extends that compounding effect into a setting — the Scottish Highlands — that has not previously appeared in the platform's UK run, adding geographic and cultural specificity without disrupting the format's established mechanics.

HARIBO's retention of Quiet Storm across the full decade of 'Kids Voices', with media handled by Mindshare, reflects a level of client-agency stability that is itself a competitive signal in the United Kingdom market, where campaign continuity at this scale is relatively uncommon in the sugar confectionery category.