THE ASK
We were challenged to help bring Tesco’s international Christmas 2023 campaign ‘Become More Christmas’ to life with localised experiential marketing activity. Tesco’s Christmas creative concept celebrated all of the little things customers do in the run up to Christmas, each cumulatively contributing to a greater Christmassy feeling.
The activation should be community-based, with the potential to be amplified as curated content to a wider nationwide audience. We worked alongside Tesco’s inter-agency marketing team to help create and distribute content from live activation, which ran nationwide as a 60 second cinema ad during December.
THE RESPONSE
The live activation celebrated Palmerstown local Sean White and his family, who for the previous decade has decorated his house in over-the-top Christmas lighting displays.
His house has become an annual Christmas attraction for the local community, and he has raised thousands of Euros for local charities on the back of it.
Working covertly with his wife and neighbours, we conspired to send him away for a weekend while the Backup team came in and turned his entire street into an extravagant Winter Wonderland. On Sean’s return, he was surprised by the community and neighbours with a lighting ceremony, complete with live reindeer, Christmas choirs, mulled wine, mince pies and master of ceremony Panti Bliss.
We collaborated with Gavin Fitzgerald, an award winning documentary maker, to direct and produce a short film on the surprise.
THE RESULT
Working alongside BBH & Mindshare, we produced the entire project within 6 weeks; from concept through to finding the right hero to celebrate, to live production, filming, editing and broadcasting the finished film.
The film was shown across 76 cinemas nationwide. The social campaign also generated strong engagement, racking up a combined reach of 1.9 million users, and 12 million views across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
