Waitrose is a premium supermarket known for its food credentials. This heritage sees sales in the last 2 weeks of December rocket, as consumers seek to trade up to the finest products, and is the store’s key trading period. The challenge for Waitrose was to encourage shoppers in earlier and not just for the ‘big day’.

With hundreds of Christmas TV messages we wanted to make our “School of Christmas Magic” ad come to life and bring a sense of this magic into the living room of viewers.

We knew that millions of people are interacting with their mobile phones and tablets every day while watching TV, yet no advertisers were taking advantage of this!Augmented Reality has been used in print and OOH but nobody had created a bespoke TV ad with this exciting medium in mind. We therefore created a shared magical experience during key family programming.We therefore created the world’s first augmented reality experience designed specifically for a TV execution! This ran on only a handful of carefully selected 90 second ads in key family programming to promote a shared experience.We got audiences excited about this by placing press ads in TV listings pages on the day of the ad’s premiere, asking readers to download the blippar AR app in advance.Once the ad played, there was a call to action to “pause and blipp” the TV commercial using the blippar app for iPhone, iPad and Android. Once scanned, two stylised banners appeared, acting as a gateway to content from the celebrity chefs Delia Smith or Heston Blumenthal.This content was made exclusively for the AR experience and clicked through to an interview with Heston or a cake decorating master-class video with Delia Smith, therefore extending the value of the TV commercial with interesting and unique content.The blippar activity achieved 42,000 scans – bringing the “Waitrose School of Magic” into the living room experience in thousands of homes.By giving households the opportunity to use their mobile and tablet devices in front of the television, we gained additional standout and created the magic of Christmas in a shared family environment.

We created an appetite for Christmas in the first week of November which contributed towards a 9.5% Y.O.Y. increase in Christmas sales. Consumers were buying Christmas food earlier than ever before with mince pies (40%), turkey (66%) and Christmas puddings (53%) all up Y.O.Y.