Advertiser: TESCO
Agency: INITIATIVE
Category: Best Use of Branded Content & Sponsorship
Digital Strategist: Ben Walton (Initiative)
Strategy
The World’s Most Trusted Reviewers: Boost Tesco’s toy sales by seeding reviews by children.Leading retailer Tesco has a reputation for successfully delivering value. With its 'every little helps' strategy, it has successfully launched into several categories, but its entry into toys was failing as it lost out to dedicated toy shops. Every Christmas parents scour the internet for the ultimate gifts and fight to get the last must-have toy on that year’s bestseller lists. The thought of buying the 'wrong' toy strikes fear into the most pragmatic mums. To convince mums they stocked the season’s best toys, Tesco handed over the messaging to the most rigorous experts in the world: kids. Children are master negotiators, ruthless in their demands and brutally honest. We knew they wouldn’t hold back.By producing reviews from these harsh critics, Tesco was able to showcase its extensive range of toys and so help Mums make decisions based on the opinions of the people who actually use them.
Execution
We identified influential mum bloggers and invited them to bring their children to a casting day to create the Tesco Toy Team, a panel of experts aged 2-8 who would film reviews of the top 12 toys. The bloggers also opened a new conversation stream, generating substantially more traction of the film reviews via their individual audiences.We collaborated with Netmums, the UK’s most influential social network for parents: feared by politicians, trusted by mums and capable of sniffing out a dud deal at 100 paces. They only enter into commercial partnerships whose message they support and they are confident is valuable to their audience.This unique content was hosted on Netmums in a specially-created toy review page, seeded out to blogging mums, hosted within Tesco.com and Tesco’s Christmas microsite, Tesco’s social media channels, email and SMS databases, augmented reality at point of sale and through their affiliate program.
Effectiveness
Tesco saw a year-on-year sales uplift of 20% across the top 12 toys featured. This was against a very challenging Christmas period. The company also saw a 48% uplift in toy sales following the launch of the online reviews. The toy reviews had received over 700,000 views in the first few weeks, were shared with Tesco’s one million fans on Facebook and received thousands of ‘likes’.