The average UK parent now spends just 34 undistracted minutes with their children every day - making ‘quality’ family time one of the most precious gifts that a British parent could receive.
But how could Sainsbury’s deliver it?
With the UK having the 2nd worst child literacy record in Europe, our solution was to create a new story to help families share the joy of reading.
We collaborated with Judith Kerr, the celebrated children’s author who had written 16 best-selling books about a forgetful cat called Mog, to write a new Mog book that would enchant a new generation of children and bring back fond memories for parents who had read the originals.
The result was Mog’s Christmas Calamity – a new book that brought the spirit of sharing at Christmas to life and whose sales would raise money for Save the Children’s UK literacy programmes in the process.
Creative Execution
To launch the campaign, Mog’s Christmas Calamity was turned into a 3½ minute TV ad.
At 7.15pm on Nov 12th, it simultaneously launched across an entire ad-break on 83 DIFFERENT TV channels. This enabled 84% of UK television viewers to see it in just one break.
At that moment, the book was unveiled in every Sainsbury’s store in the UK and we launched a fully optimised paid social campaign across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to maximise non-TV views of the film.
In the run up to Christmas:
• Sainsbury’s colleagues read the book at local schools
• we created a ‘karaoke’ Skype version of the book so parents could record a video version of the story for their kids to enjoy when they weren’t around,
• and parents submitted video of themselves reading the book to their children. These were then turned into a new TV ad that concluded the campaign.
Mog’s Christmas Calamity became the UK’s most watched Christmas TV campaign ever, being viewed 30m times on YouTube (20% more times than John Lewis)
Mog had captured a nation’s imagination and the campaign delivered for both the literacy campaign and Sainsbury’s business.
ENGAGING THE UK IN THE LITERACY FIGHT
• The large-scale launch strategy worked immediately. 39 copies of the book were sold EVERY MINUTE from launch and the soft toy sold out.
• Mog’s Christmas Calamity went on to sell 450,000 copies - making it the No.1 selling book in the UK for FOUR WEEKS (the bestselling book of ANY kind, not just the bestselling children’s book).
• The campaign helped raise over £1.6m for Save the Children to support their literacy work in the UK.
DELIVERING A COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFUL CHRISTMAS
• Post-Christmas, Sainsbury’s purchase consideration increased by 4% and it was the only major supermarket to increase its market share YOY.
This campaign demonstrates the essence of what modern media planning looks like.
A genuine insight into UK family life led to the creation of a new medium for Sainsbury’s – a joyous new children’s book.
Paid and earned media then brought the story to life across multiple touchpoints, seamlessly integrating with in-store promotion and community outreach to launch the campaign and then concluding it with a mainstream TV ad campaign that was made entirely from UGC footage of Sainsbury’s customers reading the story back to us on primetime TV.
Insights, Strategy and the Idea
Essentially targeting every family in the UK meant that we needed Mog’s story to be told at scale across multiple family touchpoints – from in-store to inside classrooms.
Our previous experience of launching Christmas campaigns also told us that our media strategy needed to address three key issues:
1) LAUNCH WITH A BANG - the first 48 hours are vital key to engaging shoppers for the duration of the Christmas run up. That meant we needed an ambitious large-scale launch plan.
2) WE COULDN’T RELY ON BEING A ‘VIRAL’ HIT - we needed to ensure that every part of our campaign was supported by a paid digital media plan that navigated our audience to Mog’s story
3) GIVE THEM MORE – our campaign needed to be more than just advertising. We would need to add depth to it by creating additional content (promote that content through paid media too).