The Future of Advertising 2024: Effectiveness Done Proper by Yorkshire Tea

To talk about what effectiveness really is and when it is measured, director of effectiveness at the IPA Laurence Green and strategy partner at Lucky Generals Loz Horner came together on the stage of the APA’s ‘Future of Advertising’ to tell the story of Yorkshire Tea.

Starting the session, Laurence questioned the ‘charts and graphs’ nature of effectiveness and equated it simply to “doing the right thing,” instead of complicating it with measurements and data. He did, also, boldly promise to use the word ‘data’ only once throughout the panel.

“Clients and agencies that commit to effectiveness find out pretty quickly that creativity and effectiveness are not at odds with one another,” he said. “In fact, the opposite.” He went on to give examples of clients who are shining stars in the IPA’s database when it comes to the elusive ‘effectiveness’ – Cadbury, McDonald’s, KFC. “It’s those clients who commit to effectiveness, yes, but also to creativity equally.”

The IPA has just closed its 2024 awards, and Laurence revealed that it is “chock-full of great advertising and great work.” But more importantly, when looking at the entry list, it is the “brand-building stuff that really works hard.”

“Because the brand-building stuff works overtime to drive profits. The quick sales stuff is useful in the short term, but it doesn’t make much difference over time. What the entries also tell us is that emotional beats rational every time – what makes people feel is what makes people think. And lastly, fame – that thing that some of you are chasing on behalf of your clients – is actually the single biggest driver of effectiveness.”

It is exactly this long-term investment into brand building that Yorkshire Tea has done. Not only this, but as Loz put it, the brand’s story is one about emotion rather than rationality and has always gone for fame and humour.

“Proper effectiveness starts really with a proper understanding of what you’re trying to do, what the business problem is,” said Loz. For Yorkshire Tea, that was very simple. When Lucky Generals started working with the brand in 2017 it was the number three tea brand, and wanted to be number one. 

“The next thing you need to do if you want to be properly effective is to understand your target audience,” added Loz. “So, we did quite a lot of work to understand tea buyers. And it probably won’t surprise you if you’re a tea buyer yourself that people are very loyal to their brand of tea. It’s often something they grew up with, something even their parents grew up with.

“Naturally, telling them to switch brands is telling them to ditch their childhood. They didn’t want to do it.” So, it’s safe to say that Lucky Generals understood the problem and understood how hard it was going to be to take customers out of the stupor in which they walk down the supermarket aisle to pick up the same tea brand every month.

“We then tried to properly get to know the company and the product. How we can promote it. We spent lots of time up in Yorkshire visiting the factory and we discovered that actually Yorkshire tea was better. A better brew.”

The reason for this better brew, Loz said, was hiding behind YT’s mantra – doing things ‘proper’ – which makes the people there go to the ultimate lengths to make the best brew possible. They’ll taste 1,000 cups a day or go to stay with farmers in Rwanda to figure out which side of the hill produces the best leaves. This, of course, goes over the average buyer’s head. So, Lucky Generals needed a creative leap to find the emotional key in YT.

“When we went up there, we figured out that it’s not just tea that they do proper,” said Loz, “it’s absolutely everything else. Their office, the biscuits they had in meetings, the way they welcomed us. The little things. If you do everything proper, surely your main thing must be amazing. This is what we thought felt emotional and had that fame potential.”

The kernel of the idea – doing everything proper – is what galvanised the idea for the entire company and the communications they do. It wasn’t just advertising the main core product – it was its variants and what it means.

Looking through the brand’s archive today, the consistent commitment to this core is staggering. “When they launched Toast and Jam a lot of people thought it’s not proper because it’s weird. That’s when we ran a campaign in which we declared it has been ‘proper out there’.

“We also used the properness idea to show off their values. So when they announced that their product was carbon neutral from field to cup, we redesigned their famous pack to include these slightly ridiculous icons of ‘Eco’ basically as a way of saying ‘Maybe that’s a bit too far. The proper way is to put a carbon-neutral stamp on the back.’”

Even when covid hit, Yorkshire Tea was concerned with staying “proper safe” with its Social Distancing Tea Pot. 

Through various campaigns, ‘properness’ ran through YT advertising’s veins. Loz told the story of a proper brand-building exercise that is still continuing to this day. “After years of work, I can tell you it works and if you’re doing it proper, if you look for that fame, emotion and consistency in brand-building, you will get great results.”

Looking at the charts, it became evident that over the course of the ‘proper’ platform and its various iterations, YT skyrocketed to first place, but Loz didn’t leave it at that.

“You will probably say, if you do like market data, that this is just volume. What about the price, have you just dropped your prices to get that volume share?” Switching to a new chart, Loz showed the audiences that in fact, YT has made those volume increases whilst charging exponentially higher prices than almost everyone else.

“That’s where the gold is,” he said. “Grow the size of the brand while also charging more. Look for fame, and support it with consistency. It pays off.”