How M&S Food won Christmas

Of all the Christmas campaigns by UK supermarkets, the M&S Food campaign was the only one that was conceived, created and produced in-house, without the help of an external advertising agency.

It was also the best performing on 3 key measures:

1. Ad awareness saw a huge leap, doubling by 25%pts to 50%, far in excess of the increase seen by Aldi and Tesco, despite having a much lower media spend (YouGov)

2. M&S Food had ‘by far the greatest improvement’ in consideration over the festive period (YouGov)

3. Ad tracking from Kantar and Zappi consistently placed the campaign at or near the top of the pile, with System1 scoring it their maximum 5.9 star rating for long-term effectiveness, in the top 0.3% of all ads ever tracked in the UK.

For this free online session, IHALC’s Patrick Burgoyne will be talking to M&S Food’s Robbie Black about why the campaign was so successful, how his team worked with production company partners to make it happen, and why M&S Food’s unusual in-house set-up is right for the brand.