In the face of competition from the growing grocery discounters Lidl and Aldi, Sainsbury’s entered Christmas 2015 with industry commentators predicting a tough Christmas trading period ahead for the four biggest UK supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons)

However, with Christmas becoming the UK’s “Superbowl moment”, Sainsbury’s didn’t just need to create a Christmas campaign that delivered commercial success. Our research learnings from previous years showed that it also needed to deliver a campaign that consumers could engage with at a level beyond mere advertising.

With Sainsbury’s proposition of ‘Christmas is for Sharing’ at the heart of our strategic approach, the objectives for this campaign were twofold:

1. To launch a Christmas campaign that would get families to share quality time together

2. To deliver a commercially successful Christmas that would increase Sainsbury’s market share

To launch the campaign, Mog’s Christmas Calamity was turned into a 3½ minute TV ad.

At 7.15pm on Nov 12th, it simultaneously launched across an entire ad-break on 83 DIFFERENT TV channels. This enabled 84% of UK television viewers to see it in just one break.

At that moment, the book was unveiled in every Sainsbury’s store in the UK and we launched a fully optimised paid social campaign across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to maximise non-TV views of the film.

In the run up to Christmas:

• Sainsbury’s colleagues read the book at local schools

• we created a ‘karaoke’ Skype version of the book so parents could record a video version of the story for their kids to enjoy when they weren’t around,

• and parents submitted video of themselves reading the book to their children. These were then turned into a new TV ad that concluded the campaign.