Christmas is the most important sales period of the year in the food retail business – and one of the hardest times to reach consumers.

Every year, ALDI – which is focussed on providing value and only offers one type of every product – faces the challenge of winning over shoppers that prefer full-range supermarkets because of their wider range of products and perceived quality.

This was hard enough at regular times, but in 2021 the challenge was made doubly difficult:

Because of the pandemic, many marketing budgets from Q1–Q2 had been frozen and activities were postponed to Q3–Q4 instead.

This had increased demand for high-quality ad inventories and created bottlenecks for availability. In short: there were too many brands competing for the same ad spaces.

So, we needed to find an innovative way of capturing our targets’ attention – and turn their “Grinch mentality” towards ALDI into Christmas love.

Our target audience were adults, 18 to 49 years old. They like to relax at home and love watching soap operas. In numbers: 25% like to watch soap operas and 10% watch every episode.

We would leverage the popularity of Germany's most popular soaps to connect with our audience.

Using AI-tech meant we could place our ads after filming had wrapped, selecting the most relevant, eye-catching scenes from the shows and integrating our ads and products into key spaces to put ALDI front-and-center.

We would ensure ALDI appeared on everything from large surfaces, digital city lights, and murals on building facades, to shopping bags in the underground and in the kitchens of the shows’ characters.

Crucially, we would select a suitable set of attention-grabbing OOH spaces and VIRTUALLY cover them with ALDI’s Christmas ads.

Working with RTL, the nation’s biggest broadcaster, we obtained episodes of the three most popular German soaps in advance and screened them to identify the

scenes that suited our purposes.

With the help of AI technology, we were then able to cluster a customised advertising space setting for ALDI.

We covered facades of the main characters' homes with murals, placed giant posters in front of locations and had special product placements e. g.:

• In scenes where actors were preparing something in the kitchen, we digitally placed an ALDI bag on the cooking island.

• When characters were riding on the underground, we inserted ALDI bags next to them… to suggest they had just come home from shopping at ALDI.

To carry along the Christmas spirit, we started our communication in mid-November 2021 and, due to the excellent performance, kept the campaign going until the end of February 2022.

Our industry-first virtual ad placement helped ALDI break new ground in Germany… reaching 51M people and boosting awareness by +100%!

Moving out of the TV ad break into the programme created the visibility ALDI needed to set it apart from its competitors and enhanced the awareness of their quality.

The results:

• 51 million contacts with +29% higher reach vs. classic ad break TV spots.

• Unaided brand awareness increased by +100%.

For 72% of the surveyed viewers, the measure makes the brand more appealing.

• Post-implementation surveys showed an increase of +10%-points on the "family-friendly" item and an increase of +3% points on the "likeability" item.

The pre-post comparison with the people contacted by the campaign shows relevant increases in the campaign-specific goals:

• ALDI products are equal in quality to products from full-range supermarkets (+12% pts.).

• ALDI has an overall attractive variety of own brands (+10% pts.)