Tesco Programmatic

Overhauling the digital process

When BBH took on Tesco in 2016 its digital advertising was all over the place being managed by different teams and companies. Much of the work was handed out to 3rd parties as part of a media buy, resulting in lacklustre and visually poor output and little to no adhesion to brand guidelines.

As part of a redevelopment of Tesco’s look and feel, I overhauled the whole digital approach to their online advertising bringing a huge improvement in both the quality and consistency of Tesco's online cross-channel presence.

Dynamic Template

In 2017 Tesco began its ‘Weekly Little Helps’ campaign which runs to this day. This is Tesco’s weekly trade output across display, print and digital ooh.

I developed a strong relationship with both the Media Agency and Google to define a future-facing platform that could manage the 8x increase in digital output Tesco was planning. The result was a dynamic, feed-driven ad suite on DoubleClick Studio capable of running multiple concurrent complex region-specific ad campaigns. We presented this at a Google Townhall on how to best use their dynamic platform for always-on trade advertising.

There are a number of key features that have meant the approach to display has continued to run in a similar way for so long:

• Every element is dynamic, so it can be updated quickly and easily. It also allows us to adapt the print campaign’s photography style from white world to full bleed and everything in between

• Linked to dynamic design templates allowing for easy mock-ups and storyboarding

• Single briefing document for client & studio minimising human error

• Geolocation by region to allow for country-specific price variances

• Ability to switch off or update at a moment’s notice, reacting to live market changes

We became so confident in the platform that we were able to have Weekly Trade, Halloween, Christmas and January sales all set up and running at different times. This ran into well over a thousand ads.

A significant benefit of this new set-up was a fixed pricing structure vs the previous bespoke cost per campaign. This allowed both BBH and Tesco to accurately forecast production and change request budgets across the year.

This approach ultimately ensured the client was more accurate with the brief, reduced the number of changes required and drove down costs whilst at the same time increasing the output of the studio.