Sainsbury's transform Goggleboxers for Christmas launch

The Big Idea

Christmas adverts from supermarket giants are now one of the most hotly anticipated advertising releases of the year, but it can be difficult to translate this directly into food sales. Sainsbury's Christmas adverts have previously created a real cut through for the brand, however they wanted to seek a way to amplify this success to align with their sales. With PHD, we teamed Sainsbury's up with our iconic show Gogglebox to create a brilliant solution that harnessed the brilliant new stop-motion creative idea from AMV.

Making it Happen

Channel 4 viewers saw an extended Sainsbury's advert during the first centre break of Gogglebox which followed the story of the advert's main stop-motion character Dave and his family in the run-up to Christmas explicitly featuring real products from the Sainsbury's Christmas food range. It was in the second commercial break that the magic happened: viewers were then surprised by a specially created Sainsbury's advert, where three Gogglebox households watched the Christmas food ad that had just run in the previous break. As our ‘Goggleboxers’ were reviewing the Sainsbury’s Christmas advert and enjoying the animation (and most importantly the food!), they were transformed into stop motion versions of themselves, becoming part of the Sainsbury’s animated Christmas world – all whilst their conversations around Sainsbury’s food continued.

To pull this one off, we need the full cooperation and buy in of all key stakeholders, at a time when all were under enormous pressure to deliver existing Christmas content.We needed to secure the full support of AMV, BBDO and Passion (the Stop Motion company creating the animation) whom were by this time going full tilt to deliver one of their most important campaigns of the year. We also needed to work within the incredibly tight filming schedules of Gogglebox, produced by Studio Lambert. For the first time in our experience, we had 6 different busy companies working together to deliver one ad…However, throughout the process the 6 teams worked together seamlessly, overcoming challenges together and finding solutions and improvements as we went through the process.

The Results

We achieved some excellent results for this campaign: 91% of those who saw the break agreed that ‘Sainsbury's have a great premium Christmas food range’ and ‘Sainsbury's is the place for Christmas food shopping’. Over a third talked to other people about the ad and 77% of viewers said it made them more likely to shop for Christmas food at Sainsbury’s. 

We also managed to translate fame and desire into actual sales: 25% of people who watched the break said they visited Sainsbury’s as a result of seeing the break – the equivalent of 1.75m incremental store visits, and 46% of those who visited a store as a result of watching the Gogglebox break went on to buy one of the products featured – with the average price of the products featured being £4.85, that’s the equivalent of £3,904,250 of sales of the products featured in the break alone. An excellent Christmas result for Sainsbury's.