Sainsbury’s was faced with a problem. It's premium own-label tier of products; ‘Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference’ was in long-term decline. To make matters worse, the premium market was growing, meaning without action the brand would fail to capitalise on a tremendous opportunity for growth.

To address this decline, Taste the Difference needed an injection of saliency, and fast. So when Channel 4 offered the chance to sponsor the Great British Bake Off, it felt like the perfect chance to position the brand at the heart of British food culture.

Given the scale of the challenge, it was evident that the creative idea would need to significantly outperform sponsorship norms to deliver the equity the brand desperately needed.

It wasn’t enough to be liked, the sponsorship needed to be loved. Only work that moved beyond the standard realm of advertising to become an actual entertainment property would cut it.

Sainsbury's wanted to sponsor the Great British Bake Off – the greatest baking show in the world – with soups, pasta, cod and steaks. So naturally we turned some of them into cake and got the nation guessing.

Using the ad break to create an interactive gameshow, we got viewers guessing if the TTD product on screen was cake, or not cake!

To keep these idents fresh and engaging, we created over 100 spots. We worked with one of the best cake illusionists in the business to create to create our deceptive and perfectly crafted cakes, which were tantamount to our success as well as keeping close to the well established Sainsbury’s brand world. Stephen Fry as VO, a white background along with dynamic Mary Ann orange font, all immediately confirmed for viewers that they were in the Sainsbury’s world.

The desire to be loved by Bake Off watchers is borne from the data. According to Thinkbox, the best-performing idents, and therefore those most likely to grow saliency, are well-liked and are perceived to fit well with the sponsorship property.

Given that there was the need to focus on a wide range of Taste the Difference products within the sponsorship, most of which were unrelated to baking, this was going to be a challenge.

The answer to this problem was found through a cultural insight. A growing trend was emerging on social; skilled bakers were disguising everything and anything as cake with hyper-realistic recreations.

Creators had already found the creative technique that would allow for Sainsbury’s to show any Taste the Difference product, while ensuring that it would be relevant to the property. Sainsbury’s was going to disguise them as cake!

When tracked against the objectives, the idents have emphatically delivered. Thinkbox identifies the key drivers for an effective sponsorship as likeability and brand fit. Channel 4 and Sainsbury’s brand tracking shows the idents are almost universally liked, with 95% of respondents claiming to enjoy the spots, a figure that increases with each burst of GBBO. Similarly, our brand fit results over index substantially.

The idents have contributed to a massive increase of 6% of both brand awareness and consideration scores. Taste the Difference sales increased by 10% YOY, outperforming our full-choice supermarket competitors’ premium ranges.

However, the most compelling result was the strong reaction across social media. Viewers flocked to Twitter to declare the game as one of their favourite aspects of the latest season of Bake Off, proving the value in pushing idents from advertising opportunities to forms of entertainment in their own right.