Agency: Wavemaker UK
Category: Best content partnership
(Large budget)
Challenge
Morrisons sources directly from British farms and fisheries and makes more fresh food in store than any other supermarket, all delivered through its Market Street counters. To stand out in the supermarket wars, Morrisons knew it had to home in on this story. However, quality perceptions among supermarkets were particularly competitive and Morrisons needed to find an edge. To combat this, the supermarket decided to elevate its Market Street offering to a broader audience to drive quality metrics. Morrisons needed media partners with trust and engagement credentials but also the reach, frequency and flexibility to deliver on seasonal offers.
Approach
Brits have an average of five dishes they cycle through during the week, so they look for similar recipes with added little twists to liven up their repertoire. This is a space that has rarely been owned by supermarket brands. Market Street has exactly what people need for recipe alternatives, with experts on hand to help. But only Morrisons customers know this. The solution was to take Market Street’s ingredient swaps to an advertising platform.
Morrisons launched a content partnership with recipe site BBC Good Food, and then scaled the reach of this content among grocery shoppers by partnering with Mail Metro Media. Firstly, Morrisons launched a national cover wrap with Metro. Over a four-month period, it then ran articles and recipe columns on both print and digital across titles including metro.co.uk, MailOnline and the Mail on Sunday’s YOU magazine, as well as on its own online blog and social activity. The placements created synergy across the entire campaign to create multiple destinations for inspiration, while also ensuring each element of the campaign was tailored to the audience of each news brand platform.
Results
Bringing Market Street out of the shadows and into this news brand content partnership proved successful in the supermarket wars. The campaign delivered a strong ROI, while quality perceptions increased over the period of the campaign. Keeping content fresh and seasonal also helped to bring audiences back time and again, with engagement consistently high across the campaign.
Judges view
This campaign was a great opportunity to improve perception of Morrisons’ Market Street throughout Mail Metro Media’s platforms.
Sue Stephenson, marketing director, Merlin Entertainments
