Tesco Mobile is the mobile business of the UK’s largest supermarket retailer. In share terms, it lags the ‘big four’ mobile network operators in the UK: EE, O2, Vodafone and Three. As an ‘outsider’, it has the opportunity to behave as a true challenger in the category.

Every Spring, the big UK mobile networks announce price increases for all their customers. With Britain in the grip of a severe inflationary crisis, 2022’s rises would be especially painful, reaching highs of up to 11.2%.

In marked contrast, Tesco Mobile had a policy of keeping its prices fixed for the length of a customer’s contract. Previously, this fact had been relegated to a bullet point in supporting copy. But clearly now was the time to surface it.

We encouraged the creative team to explore the limits of what the Tesco Mobile brand could get away with.

The result was an idea that wittily communicated outrage while at the same time leaning into Tesco Mobile’s outsider credentials as the only supermarket mobile network. It achieved this by concealing well-known expressions of outrage within verbal puns based on varieties of food that could be found on the shelves at Tesco.

As well as being uniquely branded, the ‘food pun’ construct proved to be truly memorable and contagious. Indeed, Tesco Mobile’s colleagues gleefully adopted the idea as their own, disseminating ingenious food puns of their own via their social feeds.