It's usually a bit tricky to try to explain Romanian campaigns, but this one should be fairly easy to relate to due to its, erm, rather international nature (though I am going to try my best to cover as much of the context as possible).

Two weeks ago, my former colleagues from McCann Romania launched a quite contentious campaign for ROM, a very traditional Romanian chocolate bar and one of the only brands to have survived the communist era (it's been around for over 45 years). Check out one of the ads:

And here's the other one. This was backed by print & outdoor ads, in-store promotions and all of that offline bit - but most of the activity came from the website and the campaign's Facebook page. Obviously, people went crazy over the fact that a brand was telling them it's 'cool' and 'refreshing' to replace the Romanian flag on the label with the Star-Spangled Banner. So they channeled their disappointment through home-made videos, the campaign website's comments box and through hate pages and causes on Facebook (apparently there have been over 10.000 reactions so far just across Facebook, according to a preliminary estimate). Here's my favourite.

Then people found out that it was all meant to more-or-less trigger a show of hands on who loves the old ROM - check out the updated website for the reveal - and to brilliantly support the brand's tagline (which I will roughly try to translate): 'strong Romanian sensations since 1964'.

One of the best campaigns I've seen in a while... Congrats to the team!