Paraphrasing pages 18–9 of Karen Pinkus’s Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism:

During the 1930s, Perugina–Buitoni launched a publicity campaign to raise consumer interest in chocolates, traditionally considered luxury goods. The decade was a difficult one for the sweets industry because of a number of economic factors, including the revaluation of the lira, and the higher import taxes placed on raw materials such as sugar. Perugina sponsored a radio program on the adventures of the “Four Musketeers,” and consumers began to find cheap figurines of the various characters in packages of their chocolates. Through a mechanism of identification, Perugina–Buitoni hoped to break apart the “front of indifference” that the consumer had developed toward their products. The figurine campaign, one of the most famous in the history of Italian mass culture, turned out to be immensely popular with both children and adults, and it reflected a mania for collecting that can only be termed fetishistic.

At one point during the campaign, an entire set of figurines or proof‐of‐purchase stamps could be redeemed for a Fiat Balilla and other, less substantial, commodity items (including more chocolate). The figurines—sympathetic, humanoid toys whose value in the adult market was limited—suddenly took on the exchange value of capital (the Balilla was the bourgeois, fascist dream‐good). The only obstacle to the “game” was that one needed a complete set of the [figurines], not just a certain number of any of them, which could have been acquired by investing in a certain number of chocolate packages. Some of the [figurines] were extremely common; others were quite rare. Collectors began to publish tables documenting the odds of finding a particular [one]. At that point, [they] ceased to have any value related to their form (musketeers in an adventure drama) or to the product itself, and became mere chits in a figurine stock market, traded nationally through figurine newspapers. [They] were counterfeited, stolen, trafficked; other figurine contests multiplied across the country; winners were discussed in the papers like national heroes. All of the most squalid elements present in any stock market surfaced here, seeming to replace an “innocent” children’s game.

In 1938, the Ministry of Finance issued a decree prohibiting such contests except within very strictly controlled parameters. Once again, the discourse used by the legislature was humanizing: figurine contests hurt the ingenuous participants and distracted the hard‐working fascist from the true value of labor itself. The “traditional” and “artisanal” nature of chocolates and other confections had been “lost” in the process; what had been developed initially as a stimulus to consumption was transformed, in rhetoric, into pure waste. In fact, the real impetus behind the decree may have been the threat that such contests, in which capital was circulated primarily between consumers, posed to the (wasteful) hegemony of the state lotteries. […] In essence, what concerned the regime was not immoderate acts of consumption […] but the fact that the speculation involved perfectly mimicked that of the stock market itself. The chocolate brokers had traded away the humanizing veneer of the [figurines] for the reality of capital accumulation; they had stripped the humanism from advertising.

(Emphasis added.)