Kevin the Carrot first appeared in 2016 when Aldi’s agency, McCann Manchester, set out to create a character that could cut through the noise of the crowded Christmas advertising season. Inspired by a simple 3p carrot, the team turned an everyday item into the unlikely hero of a festive campaign. Now, a decade later, Kevin has become a fixture of the festive marketing scene, with the ads earning five-star ratings in System1 testing for the past six years. But it hasn’t always been plain sailing.
A decade ago, Aldi “had a problem with Christmas,” explains Jamie Peate, McCann’s global head of effectiveness and retail. During the holiday period, shoppers visit more stores and spend more overall. Aldi saw more visitors but not higher spending, and in some cases, total spend was falling. Looking back, it wasn’t apparent at the time, but Aldi wasn’t very Christmas-focused. Its lean operation meant limited store decorations, while adding festive items wasn’t always possible.
“We realized that the creative brief really was, if we can’t be Christmas in store, how can we be Christmassy in our comms?” says Peate. “And how can we make Aldi feel famous for all those things you want to buy at Christmas?”
It was a considerable challenge, admits McCann’s chief creative officer Dave Price. But Aldi had a bit of “fame” with previous “irreverent” campaigns, so the team knew they had the scope to be a bit “different” from other supermarkets at the time. “We talk about being the pirates, not the navy, doing something a little bit differently, and it’s a great place to be for creatives,” adds Price. “It’s a lovely challenge.”
A massive fan of all things Christmas, Price has long admired the work of John Lewis and the Adam&EveDDB team. It’s an annual spot that people can’t wait to see, and something he looked on with envy. With that in mind, the creatives began writing what Aldi’s take on Christmas might look like.
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“We’d written a thing with an adult who was behaving like a child. I think we all liked it. It was innocent, and he was so excited about Christmas, like Will Ferrell in Elf,” says Price. “Then the big proper brief came in after the pitch, and it’s like, right, ‘What are you going to do?’ One team came in with this carrot idea, and instantly, we thought it was exciting. John Lewis were selling dragons for £90. Here’s a carrot that is probably 3p.” That team that pitched that first idea was creative partners Clive Davis and Andy Fenton. Price likens them to ‘The dads of Kevin’. Davis also provides the voice of the carrot.
Kevin had to be lovable for it to work. Price, Peate, and the rest of the team went on to present the idea to Aldi. At the time, the store’s chief executive asked for the weekend to consider it. By Monday, he was so taken with the concept that he stood shoulder to shoulder with the team, insisting it had to happen.
“So every year, the story has gotten bigger. Kevin’s adventures have gotten more arduous, because in year one, all you had to do was go from one end of the table to the other,” says Price. “He got burned by flaming Christmas pudding or crushed by some potatoes that look like something out of Indiana Jones. Oh yeah, traversed the knife, didn’t he, with loads of dead carrots underneath. We were trying to play with some Jeopardy.”
By the second year, Aldi made a strategic choice to maintain continuity. While other brands like John Lewis launched a different campaign each year, and Coke relied on its iconic classic, Aldi’s approach allowed Kevin to build recognition and become a regular talking point in both popular media and the ad industry. “That was a massive turning point,” adds Peate.
Each year, the team embraced the challenge of imagining what could happen next with Kevin, treating it like a new chapter in an ongoing story, one that has now outpaced even Harry Potter in length. Price and Peate joke that they are both in their 60s and fondly remember Christmas specials on TV like The Two Ronnies or Morecambe and Wise, but the idea of building characters audiences look forward to seeing in December is appealing.
The appeal lies in creating characters you grow to know, their likes, dislikes, and quirks, and then placing them in new situations. Over the years, the creatives have excelled at putting Kevin in funny, recognizable scenarios that still feel fresh. Like James Bond movies, the formula is familiar; there’s always a villain, a high-stakes plot, but the magic comes from how you inject something fresh and unexpected into that formula.
“It’s a Christmas card from Aldi to everyone,” says Price. “Who knows what the future holds for Kevin but I’ve always been a massive admirer of Nick Park and Wallace and Gromit and the fact that the family all get together and can’t wait to watch one of those things. And for me, it’s Wallace and Gromit. Other people, it was Gavin and Stacy. That’s why we did what we did this year, the marriage was a will-they, won’t-they.”
Everything always goes back to Kevin seeing the world in a childlike manner, full of wonder. There are parameters to Kevin’s world, and although it can be tempting to branch out, it would never work.
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“One year, we thought, could you show Kevin outside of Christmas in a world where he’s a celebrity? And it destroys everything,” adds Price. “You write it, and it’s like, oh, he’s not nice any more, I think he has to stay the way he is.”
The team always thinks ahead, anticipating what might work three years from now. At one point, Kevin was even in space, rescuing Father Christmas from Mars, but the idea proved complicated. Some stories come years before release, ‘A Christmas Carrot’ was pitched three years before airing. It went through various endings, including an abominable rabbit trying to eat Kevin, alongside his brother Kelvin. Research feedback refined the story. With familiar stories, you can bend the rules slightly, but too much needs explanation.
Another year, around the time M&S sued Aldi over its chocolate cake, the McCann team even wrote Cuthbert into a story with Kevin where he busted him out of jail, but it just didn’t work.
Kevin's stories always stay in the Christmas world, though the team has experimented with timelines. “Do we go back to when he was a seedling? When he was in the vegetable patch? Like a Star Wars thing? Do you do a prequel or do you jump forward?,” says Price. “There is an expectation that you will deliver what you delivered last year and be the best one ever.”
Price and Peate speak about Kevin as if he were a real person. Kevin is known for his cheeky one-liners, even when he doesn’t quite understand how hilarious he is being. The team writes that element, much like Pixar does with Toy Story, fun for kids, but also funny for adults. Price says his dream is to work on a 15-minute short film for Kevin on TV.
Peate adds that it’s easy to be cynical about Christmas, but McCann is always thinking ahead and already planning Kevin’s next adventures. “We always try and make sure that it's that the message and the vehicle we're using is relevant, but also on an upward trajectory. We do a lot of research. I mean, for years, we would always write against Kevin,” admits Price. “We’d have two or three Kevin ideas, and then six or seven that had nothing to do with him. But people always liked Kevin.”
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Looking to the future, the team is clear: they’re just getting started. Kevin has a broad canvas, and the team explores media in different ways. This year, they used an episodic approach, similar to Waitrose.
“The bigger challenge is that everyone goes for these long formats. There comes a point where you’re thinking, ‘We’re not making a movie,’ as much as I’d like to. We are in the selling game, and we probably shouldn’t tip into anything much more than a 90-second.”
Price says there are always conversations about how they would prepare audiences for Kevin’s last hoorah, but they have never once treated it as a swan song. “We always say it’s a brave person who moves Kevin along,” adds Peate. “But in a way, that also means that the challenge is very high for us.”
McCann Manchester