In the biggest show on UK TV, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Tesco created a partnership first. Through unprecedented collaboration Tesco created real-time contextually relevant content reacting to the show’s unfolding storylines and naughtiness.

Christmas 2020 was unprecedented, with Brits needing festive encouragement – four weeks before Christmas only 11% were optimistic and only 23% felt Christmas was ‘on!’

Tesco’s communications set out to entertain and inject some much-needed joy in the Christmas run up at the retailer’s most important trading period.

In 2020, like most nations, the UK improvised to get by - with 78% admitting to ‘naughty’ (but understandable) behaviour during the global pandemic.

The advertising idea ‘No Naughty List’, suggested ‘Britain, have all the treats you want, because this year at Tesco there is no naughty list’. This aligned perfectly with the biggest festive show – I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here – the narrative, whilst unwritten, is naughtiness-fuelled!

In a partnership first, Tesco created real-time contextually relevant content reacting to the show’s unfolding storylines, evictions, and naughtiness. Camp secrets were confessed in direct-to-camera films with celebrities forgiven by Tesco and encouraged to indulge with scrumptious Tesco food and drink. The seamless association was further crafted using the show’s shop and castle intro ident’s IP.

No final Tesco content existed before the first episode. What existed was a re-creation of the ‘Confession Chamber’, and edits of ‘Kiosk Cledwyn’ without audio.

Exclusive early content access gave Tesco only a 12-hour window to script and record ‘Kiosk Cledwyn’ films directly referencing what viewers had just seen in the show.

Tesco negotiated contracts with each available celebrity to participate in future content. Who that would be depended on how the competition played out on air, with a production team in Wales ready to act.

Seven films (30” & 60”) were scripted, recorded in Tesco’s ‘Confession Chamber’ and brought to air. Across 400+ spots the exiting UK stars confessed to real-life camp naughtiness and were rewarded with a delicious food spread.

The main Tesco Christmas campaign launched on 14th November 2020 in the 'I’m a Celebrity...' opening episode to ensure ‘The No Naughty List’ campaign was embedded before the partnership began on 23rd November.

Over 400 spots were bought and the media buy enhanced the contextual placement with first-in-break positioning secured every time and real-time shifting of which ad break the content ran in, to be closest to the most relevant scenes across the one-hour show.

The partnership was amplified with the Sun newspaper, known for their extensive editorial coverage as the official paper of the show. The Sun advised the ‘I’m a Celebrity...’ editorial content for the next morning and in five hours we created contextually relevant ads to book-end print and surround online editorial.

Over 20 million people saw Tesco’s show integration on TV, with an additional 8.2m reached through The Sun and 2.8m on social.

The partnership generated PR with a combined reach of 183 million – x3 the size of the country! The public was blown away with many viewers wondering how Tesco had pulled off such integration between the show and advert breaks.

Talkability for the partnership was 57% above benchmark and out-performed the previous year’s ‘One-TV’ 2019 partnership (38% increase YOY).

More importantly, with 40% greater stand-out vs. the main TV ad and a 33% buzz score the partnership was the best performing channel on the whole media plan!

The icing on the Christmas cake was its contribution to an 8.1% YoY sales increase across the Christmas period – the highest in over a decade.