Tetley’s Charming Comeback Makes All the Right Moves

You can’t understand Britain until you understand tea. We may think the high street is dominated by coffee, but in the home, it’s tea we turn to. In fact – according to the new “Britain’s Tea” creative platform from Tetley and agency Pablo – tea helps us get across things that need to be said and helps us find the right words in awkward moments. 

Tetley is an iconic British brand and has earned a place in the history of UK advertising with its classic Teafolk animated campaigns. It’s now reintroducing itself to the public with a positioning and platform that’s just as full of warmth but which focuses on slices of real life – times when a cuppa brings people together and becomes not just a drink but an expression of feeling. 

The ad we’re spotlighting for Ad Of The Week opens in the middle of one such slice of life, with a middle-aged man in a vulnerable moment. He’s taking a salsa dancing class and while we don’t see his moves, from his expression we can guess that he hasn’t set the floor alight. Another dancer gives him a friendly congratulation for trying, but it’s not until his wife arrives with a cup of Tetley tea that he understands that there’s no need to be embarrassed. “There you go, Twinkletoes” she says, handing him the tea, and a subtitle tells us what the cup means: at least you had a go. The words go unsaid, but the tea says it all. Our hero cheers up enough to strike a pose on the floor, and the couple exchange a tender look. 

It’s a charming, subtle ad which is all the stronger for not spelling out the situation. We’ve all had awkward moments where we feel we’ve let someone down, and not seeing the dancing means the audience has to focus on what the man feels about it rather than make their own judgement. His vulnerability is the problem Tetley needs to solve in the ad, and it does. It’s an ad that respects its audience’s ability to fill in the blanks and empathise, and the rich level of “between-ness” seen in the couple’s gestures and looks helps us do that. 

It’s important, too, that the ad focuses on an older couple. In our Wise Up! report we took a comprehensive look at how older people are represented in ads, and what they think of it. The results made chastening reading for brands – older people are too often seen as stereotypes or add-ons to a younger family, rather than people with their own lives and concerns. The world of “Twinkletoes” is nothing like that – the ad lets us see the affection between the couple and the awkwardness of the man trying something new for the first time. These characters feel real. 

That matters because when we tested the ad we checked how it performs not just with our standard general population sample but with a special sample of older tea drinkers – Tetley’s target market with this execution. The Test Your Ad Pro results show that “Twinkletoes” is an excellent ad for any viewer – it gets a strong 4.3-Star Rating, well above the hot beverage average. It also gets strong results on short-term Spike and on Brand Fluency, which is encouraging for a brand returning to screens. 

With older tea drinkers, though, an already strong ad gets even stronger. In Wise Up! we found that older viewers rarely rated ads higher than the general population, even when they starred older characters. But the older sample here gave “Twinkletoes” an Exceptional Star and Spike Rating. The ad really strikes a chord with viewers who can directly relate to the situation it presents. It’s proof that Tetley and Pablo are onto something special here, expressing the connection British tea drinkers have with the product and the true emotion an ordinary cuppa can sometimes hide.