How Kinder Pingui Turned Gratitude Into a Kazakhstan OOH Moment
Kinder Pingui's 2023 Kazakhstan campaign, titled "A 'Thanks' you won't forget," is a large-scale outdoor and digital integrated effort created by GForce/Grey that uses easy-to-apply stickers placed within OOH executions to prompt children to express gratitude toward their parents, linking the Kinder brand directly to moments of family warmth.
Published in September 2023, the campaign was commissioned by Ferrero Kazakhstan for the Kinder and Kinder Pingui brands. The strategic premise is straightforward: children frequently neglect to say thank you, even to the parents who play the most significant roles in their daily lives. Rather than addressing this gap through conventional advertising copy, GForce/Grey chose a participatory mechanic. Large outdoor advertisements incorporated stickers that children could physically use to deliver a message of appreciation, transforming a passive media format into an interactive gesture.
In Kazakhstan, where Ferrero operates through its local entity Ferrero Kazakhstan, the campaign ran across digital, integrated, and OOH outdoor formats, with DOOH production handled by Citix. The scope was described as a large outdoor campaign, signalling meaningful investment in physical media presence across the market. The campaign contains one documented media asset and was positioned squarely within the confectionery and snacks category, targeting children as the primary audience while engaging parents as the emotional beneficiaries of the creative idea. Clapboard scores the campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting a clear emotional insight and a distinctive tactile mechanic set against limited documented reach and engagement data.
Kinder Pingui identified a universal parenting truth as the strategic engine of the campaign. Children routinely receive care, encouragement, and sacrifice from their parents without pausing to acknowledge it, and this behavioural gap — familiar to families across Kazakhstan and globally — provided a culturally resonant platform for the brand to occupy.
The strategic logic connects Kinder Pingui to emotional territory that confectionery competitors rarely claim. Brands such as Milka and Nestlé's KitKat compete vigorously for share-of-voice in the broader chocolate and snack-cake segment, typically anchoring campaigns to taste, texture, or playful product moments. Kinder Pingui's decision to reframe the product occasion as a vehicle for family gratitude positions the brand at a higher emotional register, associating it with meaningful connection rather than simple indulgence.
The confectionery market context supports the ambition. According to Euromonitor International, the global confectionery market reached an estimated value of approximately 196.9 billion US dollars in 2023, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 4.4 percent through 2028. Chocolate represented approximately 57.7 percent of that global value in the same year, according to Euromonitor International. While no public market-size data specific to Kazakhstan's chocolate-coated filled snack-cake segment has been identified, the broader confectionery category in Kazakhstan is reported by Invest Gov Kz as a growing segment of the country's food manufacturing output, reflecting rising consumer spending on branded snack products. Against this backdrop, Ferrero Kazakhstan's investment in an emotionally differentiated campaign reflects a deliberate effort to build brand preference beyond price and product attributes alone.
GForce/Grey built the campaign's creative execution around a single, tactile idea. The outdoor advertisements were designed not merely to be seen but to be used, with stickers integrated directly into the OOH executions so that children could detach them and hand them to a parent as a physical token of thanks. This mechanic transforms the billboard or poster surface from a broadcast medium into a point of initiation for a real-world emotional exchange.
The creative decision to use stickers is well-calibrated for the target audience. Children engage instinctively with stickers as objects of play, gifting, and self-expression, and the format requires no digital literacy, no app, and no parental facilitation. The barrier to participation is deliberately minimal, which increases the likelihood that the intended behaviour — a child saying thank you — actually occurs rather than remaining a passive aspiration communicated in copy.
The campaign's brand manager is documented as Karina Murtazaliyeva of Ferrero Kazakhstan. DOOH production was credited to Citix. Production credits beyond these roles are not publicly documented for this campaign. The visual language of the execution aligns with Kinder's established brand identity: warm tones, child-centred imagery, and a tone that is affectionate without being saccharine. The integration across digital and OOH formats suggests a campaign designed for visibility at scale in Kazakhstan's urban environments, with the sticker mechanic serving as the emotionally memorable centrepiece that distinguished it from standard product advertising in the confectionery and snacks category.
No verified campaign-specific sales lift, incremental revenue, or market-share data for "A 'Thanks' you won't forget" is publicly available. The campaign has not been identified among the winners or shortlists at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards.
The archive record on Clapboard logs 919 views since the campaign's submission, with zero likes and zero comments recorded at time of writing. These figures reflect the campaign's relatively contained footprint within the global creative industry conversation rather than any assessment of its effectiveness within Kazakhstan itself.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates genuine creative intelligence. The sticker mechanic solves a real behavioural problem — children's reluctance to express gratitude — with a low-friction, high-charm solution that is appropriate for the age group and scalable across OOH formats. The emotional positioning differentiates Kinder Pingui from competitors who occupy more transactional creative territory in the snacks and confectionery segment. The campaign's primary limitation, from an effectiveness standpoint, is the absence of a documented amplification strategy: without social sharing infrastructure or a measurable digital call to action, the sticker mechanic's reach is bounded by physical proximity to the outdoor installations. Clapboard scores the campaign 63 out of 100, acknowledging the strength of the insight and the originality of the mechanic while noting the gap between creative ambition and verifiable impact evidence.
The campaign addresses children's tendency to forget expressing gratitude to their parents. Created by GForce/Grey for Ferrero Kazakhstan, it ran as a large outdoor and digital integrated campaign in Kazakhstan in September 2023, using stickers embedded in OOH executions to encourage children to deliver a physical thank-you to a parent.
GForce/Grey, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, created the campaign. The client was Ferrero Kazakhstan, with brand manager Karina Murtazaliyeva overseeing the project. DOOH production was handled by Citix. The campaign ran across digital, integrated, and OOH outdoor formats in Kazakhstan during September 2023.
Large outdoor advertisements incorporated easy-to-use stickers that children could detach and give to a parent as a token of thanks. The mechanic required no digital device or app, keeping the participation barrier minimal and making the gesture immediate and tangible for young children in Kazakhstan.
No awards have been identified for the campaign. A review of major industry award programmes — including Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, D&AD, The One Show, the Clio Awards, and the Webby Awards — found no record of the Kinder Pingui Kazakhstan 2023 campaign among winners or shortlisted entries.
Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a clearly defined emotional insight and an original participatory mechanic, offset by the absence of publicly verified performance data and a limited documented footprint in the broader creative industry record.
The campaign ran across digital, integrated, and OOH outdoor formats in Kazakhstan. It was classified as a large outdoor campaign, with DOOH production credited to Citix. The sticker-based creative mechanic was central to the OOH executions, targeting children within the confectionery and snacks category.
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