Tesco adapted Food Stories for Ramadan and it made a real connection
YouTube/EssenceMediacom and Tesco have won the Inclusive category at The Drum Awards for Digital Advertising. Here is the award-winning case study.
Tesco aimed to address the underrepresentation of the Muslim community in advertising and increase awareness and understanding of Ramadan among the wider UK audience. As the largest grocer in Britain, Tesco wanted to ensure its advertising reflected modern Britain and engaged a diverse audience. Collaborating with EssenceMediacom, Tesco sought to integrate a chapter of its 'Food Love Stories' campaign into Ramadan, connecting with those celebrating Eid while also educating the broader British population about the significance of the religious festival.
Strategy: EssenceMediacom leveraged insights from YouTube's Mirrors & Windows research, revealing that YouTube is a top platform for audiences to explore and learn about various topics. The research also highlighted that YouTube is perceived as a platform that reflects the identity and culture of self-identified Muslim audiences. Although digital targeting doesn't allow demographic targeting based on faith or ethnicity, EssenceMediacom collaborated with Google to create a custom YouTube Lineup featuring content celebrating Muslim culture and Ramadan. This contextual targeting aimed to amplify the Tesco Food Love Story message and resonate with the intended audience.
Implementation: The strategy utilized a combination of YouTube reach formats and a bespoke YouTube Lineup to achieve broad and relevant reach. The custom lineup included content exploring and celebrating Muslim culture and Ramadan. Despite the limitations of not directly targeting based on faith or ethnicity, this approach allowed for contextually relevant targeting on YouTube.
Results: The campaign achieved notable results:
Reach and Engagement: The contextually relevant campaign reached 1.1 million people across all channels, delivering content in a contextually relevant environment.
Efficiency: With 13 million impressions served at £0.01 per reached user, the campaign demonstrated cost efficiency.
Ad Recall and Awareness: The team observed a +6.3% relative lift in ad recall and a 2.8% relative awareness lift among women.
Authenticity and Inclusivity: Tesco reported from its own research that 76% of the Muslim community felt the campaign portrayed their community authentically (46% uplift), leading to a 30% uplift in the community perceiving Tesco as inclusive and a 19% uplift in the community feeling Tesco is for people like them.
Overall, the campaign successfully addressed inclusivity goals, leveraging contextual targeting on YouTube to connect with the Muslim audience and achieve positive perceptions and impact.