A Big Lidl Year

Our work
ross.mctaggart

It’s been super(market)… Our UK Senior Editor Ross McTaggart shares a few highlights from our first year working with Lidl.

We started working with Lidl back in April, after winning the business through a virtual pitch – a process that at the time felt novel and peculiar – but is now an industry norm. It’s been a brilliant eight-months, working across some amazing campaigns. Here are our best bits and key learnings from 2020.

If you can’t bake ’em, beat ’em
We’ve all got better things to be doing than baking, and there’s a reason the Lidl bakery exists. We wanted to remind our audience just how great our bakes are with a competition to win a bakery gold card offering one lucky winner a year of free baked goods (which just so happened to launch on the same night a well-known baking programme aired). The activation saw us rise to no.1 on Twitter’s UK trending tab for the duration of the show, proving the competition ain’t got pastel de nata on us. 



Castles in your kitchen
As part of a partnership with National Trust For Scotland, we were asked to create a campaign to drive interest in these amazing locations, but with almost all National Trust locations closed due to covid, we faced a huge challenge.

So, we built an AR lens that would bring Craigeivar castle (complete with fairytale dragon) to them. By using drones and laser imaging tech, we were able to capture a perfect model of the castle, helping our audience bring the Highlands to their homes.

From middle aisle to middle island
Lidl are famed for their gaudy Christmas jumpers and this year was no different. To launch it, we created a tongue-in-cheek product drop video, complete with OTT models and a glamorous location.

But given that supplies of the jumpers were limited, we also made it available in the hugely popular Animal Crossing, giving users a code to download the knit for their islander just in time for the game’s Winter Update.














View this post on Instagram





























A post shared by Lidl GB (@lidlgb)




A social-first Christmas
Working together with our paid teams and Twitter, we created Lidl’s first ever social-first launch for its Christmas ad. We built hype for the TVC with a Heart To Remind post, giving our audience the chance to be tweeted with a reminder to watch the video when it went live. We also created a custom emoji that could be triggered using #BigOnLidlChristmas, as well as taking over the ad placements First View and Spotlight, helping us hit the largest reach possible in a 24-hour window. Now, that’s a Christmas You Can Believe in.    



So, what have we learnt from working with Lidl this year? Like many successful brands, they work hard to understand their community and what makes them tick. Our biggest successes have been from ideas that were born out of culture and tap into the fandom of Lidl.

Oh, and that you can never have too many puns.