Lidl encourages Ireland to share more special moments

Like most retailers at Christmas, Lidl faced a big challenge of cutting through the seasonal, retail advertising clutter to engage with their key audience in a meaningfully differentiated way. Lidl wanted an appealing campaign that had national reach but with a distinctive local feel that will drive footfall and boost average basket size.

It was a big ask. Cue the creative talents at IRS+ and our local station heroes.

Having identified a special moment that families share at Christmas time, IRS+ developed a cross platform campaign around this particular moment. The special moment? Story time.

“The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.”

― Rashers Tierney

Each station asked listeners to write their own Christmas stories, tapping into the emotion of the season, while providing a special moment for parents to share with their children as they sat down to write their stories. Each station set up a dedicated email for entries, however with so many stories hand written and hand delivered to the station our crew were starting to feel like Santa Claus himself! The personal connection that each station has with their audience became more and more apparent throughout this campaign and served as a great example of how radio delivers contextual advertising.

The story time concept was amplified on air across 14 stations with a weeklong competition inviting listeners to write their own Christmas story. This mechanic was followed with a roadshow of outside broadcasts travelling around the country within our 14 franchise areas and supported by pre promotions on air and social posts across all stations social media channels.

These OBs brought to life the Christmas village created by Lidl with live storytelling, Santa visits, face painting and food sampling. In the spirit of giving, the OBs provided an exciting platform for Lidl to give back to the local community.

Each OB ran in line with the competition keeping the momentum strong, advertising the local event and providing families with another platform to “Share More Special Moments” compliments of Lidl.

Fully supported across each of the stations social media channels, posts were kept consistent yet interesting for their band of active followers.

Although there were posts to support the competition they were primarily focused on building awareness of the competition. Posts relative to the OBs were very engaging and wide reaching due to fun and festive feeling portrayed within the images. The images were genuine and authentic further embedding Lidl into the fabric of the local community.

Averaging the number of pre promotions across the competition and OB period along with an estimate of on air mentions resulted in very high frequency achieving the desired cut through of the retail clutter throughout the season and across key target audiences.

The nature of the on air content was very engaging for listeners with stations putting a lot of support behind the brand messages. The quality of on air reach is something that cannot be measured. One could argue that it’s priceless.

“This campaign, particularly the outside broadcast, showed the real strength between local radio and a big brand like Lidl. It really connects with our listeners when big brands put down roots in our area.”

A nation of Irish storytellers lived up to their reputation with over 1.2k competition entries demonstrating how actively engaged our listeners were with the competition.

The prize value was attractive and the creative execution was embedded into each radio show in a natural and entertaining way. On air mentions kept listeners involved, entries steady and the “share more special moments” story alive.

The whole campaign highlighted a real commitment from listeners to engage with the Lidl brand and ultimately achieved the overall objective of cutting through the seasonal clutter, building awareness and driving new footfall to the local Lidl stores.

FUN FACT

Lidl sells three times more whole chickens every year than there are people living in Dublin.*