The Best of May: Tesco’s Giant Success
The breakout star of May’s advertising is a gentle giant, twenty feet tall and made out of fruit and veg, which he happily distributes to the nation’s kids. Created by BBH London for Tesco, he’s named Plumbert and he’s already a social media sensation. This Big Fruity Giant has shown up in-store, on billboards and bus shelters, and most vitally in a 90-second hero spot for the retailer.
We ran the ad through our Test Your Ad platform and the verdict is as clear as it possibly could be. In every sense, Plumbert is a massive success. It’s Tesco’s first ever maximum Star Rating (5.9-Stars), predicting the highest level of long-term business impact. It’s also the most effective supermarket ad of the last 12 months and the most effective non-Christmas Supermarket ad we’ve ever tested.
And Plumbert’s outsize achievements don’t end there. His ad also gets an exceptional Spike Rating, predicting short-term sales boosts, and exceptional Brand Fluency (rapid and accurate recognition). It’s set to finish as one of the top ads this year.
One of the things that’s remarkable about Plumbert is that this isn’t a typical brand ad at all. It’s strongly branded, with Tesco prominent, but the focus is all on the brand’s Free Fruit & Veg For Schools program. The Test Your Ad results are a brilliant score for any ad but especially impressive and exciting for one that has such a powerful connection to healthy eating and doing some good.
The lesson for other brands is that a sustainability or social message will land far better when you apply creativity, storytelling and the magic of creating such a vivid and memorable character. Plumbert demolishes himself at the end of the ad to feed the kids but with results like these we hope he won’t be gone for long.
Elsewhere this month we’ve got three other brands who are breaking category conventions to deliver their brand messages in a very unusual way. First up is Pinterest, with their “The best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline” video. As the title suggests, this is a brave move by a social media brand, encouraging its users to, as they say, ‘touch grass’ with a nostalgic and bittersweet ad. A girl wonders how people managed in the pre-social media days, with a montage of images showing exactly how they did.
It’s a bold ad that implicitly criticises its entire category but Pinterest have struck a chord here, landing in the top 10 of all the social media ads we’ve tested with a strong 4.2-Star Rating. This despite the high level of sadness the ad evokes. It’s positioning Pinterest as the social network that respects and reflects your offline life and hobbies, and so far audiences are responding.
Lexus are another brand blending the offline and online worlds, with a fine social video execution playing on the “GRWM” (Get Ready With Me) trend. A Lexus electric vehicle gets ready for a drive and takes the viewer through its tongue-in-cheek preparations, showing off all its fabulous features on the way. It’s a way of speaking to younger audiences in a platform-native way and our Test Your Ad Social diagnostics show it does particularly well with younger audience segments.
Sustainability and environmental messaging is rare across advertising – only 8% of ads feature it – and even less common on social video, so this way of promoting the environmentally friendly EV range is worth noting. In an environment where very few ads score well, Lexus lands a 3.5-Star score on Test Your Ad Social, well over the social video norm. The storytelling-first style keeps viewer attention, critical with a medium where brands only have 2.5 seconds to win and keep viewer interest and engage the audience emotionally.
Star Rating isn’t the only game in town for brands, of course, and our final ad from Anchor Butter cuts through its highly commoditised category on our other key measures, short-term Spike and Brand Fluency. “Absolutely Buttered” is a cheeky, surreal ad that uses trippy visual language to suggest that a slice of buttered toast is a psychedelic experience so good you’re oblivious to the outside world.
The ad taps a vein of quirky British comedy that really makes it stand out in the spreadables category, with exceptional Spike Rating and exceptional Fast Fluency – the proportion of people recognising the brand in the first few seconds. Its Star Rating is slightly above the category norm too – the ad’s unique comic approach is helping it stand out without putting viewers off. That can be a tricky tightrope to walk and Anchor deserve applause for creating something so distinctive.