Tesco claims Xmas ad campaign success
March 6, 2020
UK supermarket chain Tesco has revealed the results of its Christmas campaign with Channel 4, ITV and Sky Media, suggesting the collaborative approach had strong recall and additional benefits.
The collaboration campaign cut through at the most competitive time of year and helped the supermarket achieve its fifth year of Christmas growth. The results announced at the Big TV Festival follow on from last year’s call to brands and agencies to present the broadcasters with a joint brief, which Tesco subsequently proposed.
Tesco and MediaCom worked with the three major broadcasters to create ten second clips from their talent and shows including I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, Hollyoaks, The Chase, A League of Their Own and Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday to air across all three stations. It was the first time a brand has brought all three broadcasters’ talent and shows together in a ‘one TV’ creative partnership.
The ten second clips, produced by MediaCom and Somethin’ Else, were stitched together to form ‘super spots’ that saw Tesco’s time-travelling delivery driver hop through time and channels to deliver Christmas to eight of the nation’s most-loved TV shows. The ads were contextually placed on linear and VoD to run during the shows which they feature.
The campaign had strong recall, with 72 per cent of those viewing contextual ads recognising the advertising – smashing the benchmark of 49 per cent. And, the contextuality had additional benefits with viewers seeing the advertising as “capturing the magic of Christmas” (71 per cent contextual versus 59 per cent non-contextual) and being “inspirational” (50 per cent contextual versus 36 per cent non-contextual).
Ultimately, through its relevance and collaboration the advertising worked to increase purchase intent for Tesco.com by 60 per cent amongst viewers of contextual ads compared to non-viewers, at a highly competitive time of the year.
“2019 marked 100 years of Tesco bringing families up and down the country together to celebrate Christmas with good food,” noted Nick Ashley, Head of Media and Campaign Planning at Tesco, commented. “In this unique cross-TV collaboration, we saw our loveable delivery driver magically channel-hop to deliver food to some of the nation’s best-loved shows. The partnership has reinforced the value of context, collaboration and creativity in the TV industry.”
“TV has always helped brands drive fame and business results, but when Tesco took us up on our offer to collaborate the results not only looked great on screen, but cut through and delivered for Tesco at the most competitive time of year,” added John Litster, Managing Director at Sky Media.
“The collaboration with Tesco demonstrates how creative TV advertising has the power and reach to drive both emotional engagement with our viewers and fantastic brand value for our advertisers,” commented Simon Daglish, Deputy Managing Director, Commercial at ITV.
“TV advertising remains unique in its ability to deliver powerful results at scale and we are hugely proud of this brilliant creative collaboration with Tesco and our fellow broadcasters,” declared Matt Salmon, Interim Sales Director at Channel 4.