If you don’t work in Grocery, keep scrolling

This year’s Barcode Festival was the first since GroceryAid’s rebrand, last December. We wanted the rollout to do that work justice, carrying the same care and consistency into every application.

Barcode Festival is one of the flagship events in GroceryAid’s fundraising calendar. Held once a year, it brings the grocery industry together for one big day out, with hundreds of brands taking part, from startups just finding their feet to household name multinationals. Colleagues from across the sector get to sample, play and connect, all in support of the charity. This year, more than 5,000 people attended, helping the event raise over £1.1 million for GroceryAid. Ben and Phil were there too, meeting suppliers and clients and spending time with the people we work for every day. It is one of the parts of the job we value most. Grocery is a close-knit industry, and Barcode is where that shows.

Pip helped GroceryAid with aspects of the rollout in the run-up to and around the event, spanning advertising, onsite creative and everything in between. The bulk of the work sat in the weeks before Barcode, building awareness and getting the new brand in front of as many people as possible before the day itself arrived.

If you don’t work in Grocery…

The centrepiece of the run-up was Barcode’s first out-of-home campaign. The idea was simple and a little cheeky. If you don’t work in Grocery, don’t look at this billboard. A line built on exclusion rather than invitation, designed to catch the eye precisely because it seemed to be talking to someone else. For anyone in the industry, it landed as a wink. For everyone else, it was just enough of a puzzle to make them look twice.

The campaign ran roadside on the North Circular for the week leading into the event, large format and impossible to miss for the thousands of grocery colleagues making their daily commute past it.

Building momentum

Alongside the OOH activity, we developed a full suite of digital and print advertising to build awareness in the weeks before Barcode. This included MPU banners and paid advertising creative, social content, print ads placed in grocery trade press, and a set of digital assets that partner organisations could use to promote the event themselves.

Keeping everything consistent across so many formats and channels was key. Whether someone saw the campaign on the North Circular, in a trade publication or in their social feed, it needed to feel like the same idea, told well, and true to the new brand.

On the day

We also contributed a small amount of creative for the event itself, including content for the large format screens on the main stage and artwork for the GroceryAid team’s onsite uniforms. It was a modest addition compared to the run up work, but every touchpoint matters when a brand this new is being seen by this many people at once.

Working as part of the team

Barcode is a good example of how we like to work with GroceryAid, not as an external agency parachuted in for a single brief, but as an embedded creative partner across the whole campaign, from the first idea through to the day itself. Seeing the new brand out in the world, and seeing over £1.1 million raised for a cause we believe in, made the months of work leading up to it feel very worthwhile.

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