Tesco’s Ramadan billboard wins top prize at The Drum Awards for Out of Home

Winning the coveted Grand Prix was the agency collective behind Tesco’s ’Together this Ramadan’ billboard campaign, which included Kinetic, Mediacom, BBH, DOOH.com and The Unmistakables.

The Big Issue Group and Forever Beta, meanwhile, were rewarded the Chair Award as well as Best Use of Digital, Best Use of Context and Best Use of Location for the ’I’m Here’ campaign, which connected street vendors to digital out-of-home screens through geolocation technology.

Chairing the awards jury this year were Jonathan Emmins, founder and global chief executive officer at Amplify, and Lorie Jo Trainor Buckingham, group creative director of Deliveroo. They were joined by a panel of senior marketers from various companies including Clear Channel UK, BBH London, 360i, Alight Media, Coca-Cola, VIOOH, JCDecaux, Talon Outdoor America and Ikea.

You can see all the amazing winners and work right here and find out more about the top winners below.

Grand Prix and Best Use of Digital Technologies

Agencies: Kinetic, Mediacom, BBH, DOOH.com and The Unmistakables

Client: Tesco

Campaign: Together this Ramadan

Ramadan is one of the biggest festivals for the Muslim community. Within the UK, over 4 million Muslims observe and celebrate throughout the month. However, the festival is often misrepresented or largely absent in British media, with many UK Muslims feeling they are often portrayed in a negative light.

Serving customers and communities a little better every day is fundamental to Tesco’s business strategy and purpose. And with the Muslim community often feeling misunderstood or unheard, the brand set out to change this and Ramadan was the most important moment to do so, celebrating and supporting the Muslim community while educating and raising awareness among non-Muslims.

Smart data via Kinetic Journeys/ONS was used to precision-plan sites that were east-facing and within key Muslim hotspot areas, carefully avoiding stores and venues that sold alcohol. The creative message worked in perfect harmony with the media placement, using the latest day-and-night digital technology to display a fasting and non-fasting message. The accuracy of this was crucial to ensuring UK Muslims were not encouraged to break fast early, so the digital technology activated each site at the specific and changing time of sunset for each individual location. Prior to sunset, the message displayed empty plates, with the plates filling up at sunset with a supporting message.

The campaign saw a 275% uplift of Tesco and Ramadan mentions on social and received applause from Muslims and the wider public: Net Sentiment Score was +13, versus +12 for Tesco’s Christmas 2021 launch.

Chair Award, Best Use of Digital, Best Use of Context and Best Use of Location

Company: The Big Issue Group

Client: Forever Beta

Campaign: I’m Here

’I’m Here’ connects street vendors to digital out-of-home screens through geolocation technology. Forever Beta redesigned the iconic red jacket of street newspaper The Big Issue’s sellers to incorporate geolocation beacons. The beacons track vendors’ movements when they walk along the street and, once in range, the digital screens are triggered and point people in their direction – right down to how many meters away they are.

Once triggered, apart from direction and distance, each screen portrays the specific nearby vendor image, with movements and emotions captured in the studio to make the OOH as reactive as it could be, improving its visibility and humanizing the media The ’I’m Here’ campaign made invisible people visible.

During the campaign, sales of the magazine increased by 400%, quadrupling the average daily sales of The Big Issue. In addition, the daily effective circulation of the campaign was 460,000 and the unmissable giant billboards supercharged vendors’ sales, encouraging direct interactions, starting more conversations and reaching more people than ever before.