Tesco brought the three largest UK TV stations – ITV, Sky and Channel 4 – together for the very first time.

Not only working together on the same brief, but collaborating and co-creating in never-before-seen scale for Britain’s largest retailer.

Such an unprecedented alliance required unprecedented integration across creative, IP, talent, programming and media buying involving the client, media owner and media agency to work in harmony.

The end result?

World class media innovation.

Christmas makes or breaks a retailer’s year – and 2019 was shaping up to be the toughest Christmas in the UK since the recession. The combination of the General Election, the delay in Brexit’s ‘exit day’, and the drop in disposable household income quarter on quarter meant consumer confidence was sitting at -14.

Despite these tough trading conditions, Tesco wanted to beat back its competitors to increase like-for-like sales in the UK and ROI.

Our brief was to excite the nation and get the nation talking about and buying at Tesco for Christmas.

At Christmas, competitors up their game creatively every year, striving for Christmas sparkle. Newspapers count down the arrival of the Christmas ads, igniting public interest in advertising.

The ad campaign celebrated Tesco’s 100th Christmas, featuring a time-travelling delivery driver who delivered Tesco food across the decades – crossing paths with Winston Churchill, ravers at a 90’s party, and kids from the 1920s.

Ordinarily, you might work with one partner to bring the campaign idea to life. But because a time-travelling delivery driver doesn’t just time hop, he can channel hop too across the three biggest broadcasters – ITV, Channel 4 and Sky!

The strategy was for Tesco’s delivery driver to hop through programmes and channels on a fantastical journey through the nation’s most loved TV, interacting with the nation’s most loved talent.

A media first, collaboration on this scale had not been done before across channels, programmes and talent.

An AV partnership was the perfect solution – with proven success for the industry and for Tesco, we were able to cut through the Christmas noise and reach the nation at scale.

Our ambition was to excite the nation with the most entertaining celebration of the Christmas season, embedding Tesco in the nation’s festive TV. Quite literally, in it.

Taking inspiration from the nostalgic main TV campaign in which the delivery driver hopped through famous moments in time our idea was for him to hop through eight of the nation’s favourite shows across ITV, Channel 4 and Sky.

This sounds easy. It was not. We had to identify shows with both brand & talent suitability and with IP flexibility and sets available to shoot at the busiest season.

There were many moving parts to make the impossible possible.

Tesco worked with three major partners, eight key festive TV shows and eight well-loved celebrities to create ten new AV assets, and created a roadblocked three-channel launch for the assets.

In a true first, we featured all three broadcaster logos alongside Tesco’s in a launch ident on 22nd November 2019 with an uber 30” edit running across all three stations at the same time.

The power of context was critical with 6 out of 10 of spots on TV and VOD played out in the breaks of the shows and talent they featured. Such specific spot buying is atypical, requiring 450 spots to be manually negotiated and booked with the stations.

In addition, bespoke edits were produced for social, enabling Tesco to tap into the talent’s influential 5.3m organic fans and followers.

The first ever ‘One TV’ partnership reached 21 million (65%) main shoppers.

The ambition upped the entertainment factor and those who saw the partnership found it 14% more ‘entertaining advertising’ than those who just saw the main TV ad (62% vs 48%).

Buzz increased by 12% when the partnership launched and talkability of the Christmas campaign increased by 3% (19% vs 16%).

Context spot buying was rewarded with 72% of the viewers of the featured shows recognising the assets and improved recognition of the main TV campaign by +13% - adding 3% unique recognition to the overall campaign.

Versus non-contextual placements the partnership results delivered on a host of other key metrics:

‘Likeability’ (+12pts)

‘Relevance’ (+15pts)

‘Stand out’ (+21pts)

‘Improved opinion’ (+18%)

‘Consideration’ (+10%)

‘Claimed purchase’ (+2%)

And despite strong headwinds, the ‘One TV’ partnership helped Tesco deliver a positive Christmas with UK sales up 0.4% LFL (most retailers were negative) – astonishing given the economic uncertainty!