Milka revives Poland's door nameplates so neighbours finally talk to each other

Polish apartment blocks were once places where neighbours knew each other's names, but the door nameplate — the small brass sign that announced who lived behind each door — disappeared after 1989. By the time Milka's researchers looked, 20% of Poles could not name a single neighbour, even though 93% said strong neighbourly relations mattered to them.

Milka's response, built with Ogilvy Poland around the brand's 'tenderness' value, was to hand neighbours back their names. The company found Jarosław Wojdak, a craftsman who had spent 45 years making nameplates for buildings that had stopped ordering them, and used his story as the campaign's heart. Milka produced 50,000 packages — each holding a personalised nameplate and a chocolate bar meant for the stranger next door — and placed them on apartment doors across seven Polish cities.

The gesture worked because it was physical and specific. Tens of thousands of people hung their new nameplates and left a Milka bar for the neighbour they had never met; the documentary about Wojdak accumulated five million views and earned three million more through organic national television coverage. The activation reached 21 million people in total, and the three limited-edition runs sold out — 14.27 million incremental bars across the wider platform.