Costa partnered with Magic FM and Metro to launch a campaign celebrating Costa being the nation's favorite coffee shop. The campaign asked the public to vote weekly on their favorite things through different "head to head" topics. It was sponsored on Magic FM's morning show and amplified through Metro newspaper's print ads and brand activation events, generating over 92,000 votes. The campaign successfully engaged audiences across multiple channels and increased brand warmth for Costa.

1. Costa,Metroand
MagicPartnership
Category:
Omnimedia Award
ExecutiveSummary:
To celebrate Costa being the Nation’s Favourite Coffee shop we wanted to find out the
Nation’s favourite things by asking them to vote on relevant and topical head to heads.
Ensuring we were present in the mornings when coffee is front of mind, we sponsored
Magic in The morning breakfast show on Magic FM and then amplified it with the Metro
to bring the campaign to life for an entire nation.
BackgroundandObjectives:
We wanted to create brand warmth by finding a culturally relevant way of celebrating
the fact that we’re the nation’s favourite coffee shop.
Ultimately, we want to own the concept of the ‘Nation’s Favourite’ and find a way to
have cultural relevance, not just category relevance. We want to be a culture
commentator and an arbiter of national opinion.
To be a favourite, and to earn the credibility to be culturally relevant, we had to
communicate with scale, with a trutsed partner and with frequency in an appropriate
consumption occasion.
It was important therefore for us to be present in the mornings when commuters were
thinking of their morning coffee. We realised this with a campaign with Metro to really
turbo-charge our Magic in the Morning Sponsorship.
Working with Metro enabled us to further the reach across the UK, regionalise our
display media, and bring the voting mechanic to life with experiential.
Additionally working with a newsbrand like Metro meant that we could create a live feel
to the campaign with weekly updated results appearing in print, and voting topics that
were relevant to what was going on in the news at the time. This would not have been
possible across a publication that would have longer lead time.
Insight:
Costa leads its category on overall brand preference, but does not lead on coffee
satisfaction, and cannot afford to be complacent. Brand trust is a key reason for visiting
Costa, but we knew there was an opportunity to further reinforce this.
We knew we didn’t want to beat our own chests or pat ourselves on the back, but we

2. want to confidently open up an exciting conversation with the audience and find out
more of the nation’s favourite things and evoke a two way conversation/draw
consumers into the brand.
So we wanted to look beyond coffee to the Nation’s other favourite things which was
then brought to them by the nation’s favourite coffee shop brand.
ThePlan:
The whole campaign was centred around a weekly head to head ‘Nation’s Favourite’
where the public could vote on 7 different topics. Topics included what people preferred
to do on the bank holidays and whether the new royal baby would be a girl or a boy. All
campaign media drove to a bespoke Costa custom voting page.
We executed it via a sponsorship on Magic in the Morning for three months and worked
with Metro to amplify this further. We utilised the radio’s editorial team to bring their own
head to head debates daily to integrate our ‘Nation’s Favourite’ message further.
The print partnership included 4 x front page strips, 3 x 24x4 page 2 display ads, 3 x
10x7 page 3 display ads within the media across the 7 weeks. To bring the voting to life
we held brand to hand Metro events across various major distribution points across the
country and regionalised the print display media to make sure people were aware this
was going on in their local area.
Results:
We received 92,425 entries around the UK for the weekly head to heads can be
attributed to media. Radio over-delivered in value due to editorial nature by 34%. With
the Metro brand-to-hand we received 6340 experiential votes across the UK. 28% of
the audience we surveyed recalled seeing the campaign in a newspaper. The research
told us overall that those that recalled the campaign had a clear understanding of the
messaging and was well liked, driving a positive response.
ClientView:
‘We were very happy with our ‘Nation’s Favourite’ campaign which did a fantastic job of
engaging our audience across so many different touchpoints to flow from the Metro
print and display so seamlessly in to all our other campaign elements such as radio,
social and display. It met objectives of increasing brand warmth to those exposed to the
campaign and also provided us with an excellent platform for our competition to
generate lots of data capture for our CRM campaigns.’
Kirstey Elston, Head of Marketing