Embracing the controversy of Yorkshire Tea’s Toast & Jam Brew
Yorkshire Tea’s “Specialty brews” are an R&D range, which tests innovative flavour variants, like their Breakfast and Biscuit Brew. The launch of their “Toast & Jam” Brew was likely to be polarising and hell hath no fury as a Yorkshire Tea drinker scorned, so, driving buzz and trial, whilst not alienating loyalists, was key.
Knowing this launch was going to be controversial, nothing prepared us for the reaction on social media. Whilst some shared delight, there were many (often hilarious) damning critiques. These reactions could drive trial and PR more than anything ad geniuses could devise, so we used the reviews verbatim in our ad campaign. We had the clients agree to our plan late on a Thursday evening, with us canvassing media owners for last-minute access, and choosing the most impactful, visual sites to get the ads out asap. Spending just £80k, we had a live national OOH campaign in under 48 hours, hitting Saturday retail footfall, supported by Spotify takeovers, and paid social.
At the launch of Toast & Jam in Asda, the product flew off the shelf at a faster rate than we could keep up with. Toast & Jam saw overwhelming joyous sentiment toward the campaign at 64% and the range had an outstanding initial 12 weeks, with sales up 83.7%, the largest contribution to the Speciality Black Tea sector at +£452k. Additionally, our campaign received PR coverage in both mainstream and trade press. Our plan to give the haters a voice made the brew the toast of Yorkshire Tea and paid dividends in increasing market share.