Greggs’s unexpected partnership with Nigella Lawson for its 2025 Christmas menu launch won Gold in Partnership or Collaboration at The Drum Awards for Marketing. This campaign aimed to generate buzz and drive footfall during the festive season, leveraging Nigella’s iconic status to create a cultural moment that captured national attention and generated over 1,520 media coverage.
Greggs has strong awareness levels (+90%) but needs to stay at the forefront to consistently drive its consideration and purchase intent levels against competitors with massive advertising spending. We needed to excite all audiences about the festive menu launch and the return of the infamous Festive Bake to generate a high share of voice and brand buzz at the beginning of the Christmas period against multiple food-to-go retailers, including McDonald’s, Costa, KFC, and Subway. And ultimately, to drive footfall in its golden quarter.
We had to make the launch of the Greggs festive menu and the return of its iconic Festive Bake a national moment that got everyone talking. Greggs’ long-term ambition is to become as much a “starting gun for Christmas” as the Coca Cola Trucks, the Starbucks Red Cups, and John Lewis’ adverts. To do that, we knew we needed to go beyond the menu itself and create a cultural thumb-stopping moment so unexpected that it would stop everyone in their festive tracks. Plus, we needed to be first!
Greggs teams up with Nigella. For swathes of society, Nigella Lawson's festive TV shows are as much a part of Christmas as… well… Santa and the elves. Recruiting a genuine British culinary icon whose unique persona and wonderfully indulgent recipes epitomise the height of decadent middle-class at-home dining as the face for our launch. This was undoubtedly on no one's 2024 bingo card.
To launch Greggs’ 2025 Christmas Menu, we created Greggs’ first ever “Christmas Advert”, which was fronted by the domestic goddess herself. Nigella (described by one writer) “oozes as much indulgence as one of her own trifles” in the spot. The ad –created for its editorial and social value– was hailed “an unexpected, cheeky stroke of genius.” You can watch it here: here.
Caught post-shoot by unexpected paparazzi, the hype for the campaign started two weeks early as Nigella was captured, leaving the shoot with a Greggs bag in hand. The resulting images landed on page three of the Mail on Sunday (the UK’s biggest-selling national Sunday).
From there, the news spanned across several media titles. Spinning the line that Nigella had “snubbed” promoting Greggs’ iconic Sausage Roll (she was never going to), the next wave of coverage landed –this time gracing storyteller’s holy grail: a full-page on The Sun’s page three.
By the time we came to launch the festive ad, we were already knee-deep in coverage while levels of enthusiasm and speculation had reached fever pitch. It was at this point we unleashed Nigella’s contribution to the festive season –and were the first brand to launch. The ad premiered jointly on Nigella’s and Greggs’ Instagram channels, creating a wave of appreciation and excitement. Pre-sold stories hit the media, creating a further wall of news coverage.
With the seeds of excitement sown, every title had its own take –from titles covering Nigella’s high camp and saucy delivery to settling of the row over sausage rolls to debate about whether Greggs had picked wisely in its choice of festive ambassador (universal answer: “yes”). Social media channels exploded with appreciation, declaring the unlikely pairing the perfect couple. As another writer put it: “of all the Christmas adverts jostling for attention this week, had anyone expected a cheeky takeaway chain to come out in front?”. But come out in front, they certainly did.
The coverage was wall-to-wall. There were over 1,520 pieces of coverage for the Christmas campaign from start-to-finish. Critically, over 70 of those came from national media titles –across print and online –demonstrating the cut-through generated by the campaign. Broadcast was far and wide across multiple radio stations and featured on both ITV’s Good Morning Britain and Lorraine.
Reach for the campaign was 37 million (92% of the UK adult population) from 4.56bn Opportunities to See (Meltwater), suggesting a frequency in excess of 14 impacts per person reached. Half (49.5%) of the coverage was “strongly favourable”, while just 0.8% was negative towards the campaign (Meltwater analysis 14 November 2024). In addition, social conversation generated a reach of 7.3m with over 400k engagements. As a result, Greggs generated greater share-of-voice for its Christmas ad than Sainsbury’s (+24%), Tesco (+34%), Aldi (+36%) or John Lewis’s (+6%) efforts at its launch –on 10-15% of the budget.
Post-campaign YouGov research showed that 70% of the UK population were aware of the campaign. Of those who saw the campaign, 74.4% said they were more likely to consider purchasing from the brand (YouGov polling 13 November 2024). On the week of the launch, Greggs enjoyed a boost across all of their YouGov media metrics, including a 35% uplift in Buzz scores against the week before the launch, as Greggs and Nigella became the talk of the nation. The performance in Buzz scores and attention around the brand held over the weeks following launch as the conversation continued around all things Christmas.
According to Kantar analysis, the ad was top-3% for “positively surprised”, “brand difference” and stopping power.
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