You may have seen a remodelled version of the Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny gracing the pages of the Metro of late (which seems to be where most of the advertising budget was spent on a newspaper wrap). Taking more than a dash of inspiration from Jessica Rabbit, she’s been given a facelift to coincide with the launch of ‘Caramel Nibbles’ – a new bite size version of the British confectionery.

Back in February of this year, the Cadbury Caramel rabbit had a ’sexy’ makeover as part of a £1.2m revamp for the brand. The ‘Still Got It‘ campaign, saw her image adorning press and outdoor advertising after last appearing in the branding in 2001.

This time around, Cadbury have brought in fashion designer Giles Deacon in to add a touch of street cred to her dress, also asking him to create a ‘Caramel Nibbles’ scarf – which will be given away in what could be the best example of true offline/online collaboration we’ve seen in recent years.

Drawing on the recent pop-up shop phenomenon (where brands build a shop that stays in one place for a short period of time, then might move or close down), Cadbury have built a real life ‘Caramel Nibbles Boutique’ on Carnaby Street, but only made it accessible online.

In order to take home one of the limited number of free scarves, clues about the blogs and websites that you could access the shop from were posted and shared on the ‘Caramel Bunny’ Facebook page and appeared on Nibblesboutique.com. A #nibbles hashtag on Twitter also helped those on the lookout.

Widgets designed to look like shop windows appeared on blogs including BitchBuzz Style and Mademoiselle Robot, as well as bigger sites like MSN, ASOS and handbag.com. Each was only ‘open’ for a certain amount of time, but once located, fans could join a virtual queue and wait to be served by assistants. Mirroring a real shopping experience, this was streamed live from the boutique as winners watched their scarf being packaged and shipped out to them.

In a nice final touch, those that missed out on the chance of claiming a free scarf can head to John Lewis where they can buy one for £15, with proceeds going to Breast Cancer UK.

The idea for creating the world’s first live digital pop-up shop apparently came from wanting to recreate the normal hysteria around a limited edition fashion launch – but doing so on a much bigger scale. However, you could only win a scarf if you were based in the UK, so though the brand stirred up a lot of excitement internationally via social networks – they couldn’t really fulfill the demand (even on a small scale to maintain exclusivity).

The stunt seems to have created excitement and irritation in equal measure. A lot of the comments on the Facebook page (with 31,759 fans) are from people complaining about technical glitches, getting kicked out the widget before being able to purchase – or simply not being able to find an open shop. Though Cadbury intended to keep an element of ‘limited edition’ within the project, they might have fared better with clearer instructions and stronger tech support.

That said, it’s fantastic case study – and coming up with a unique idea is a hard thing to do these days. Hats off to them.