Havas’ mission to make Ocado feel human and personal

The Media Plan

Ocado, with creative work by Uncommon Creative Studio, tasked Havas Media with a challenge: make a digital brand feel human and personal.

In fact, in Havas’ research, it found that Ocado had a “visibility problem”: while it’s loved by loyalists, others are not aware of it — partly because it has no brick-and-mortar stores.

So the agency aimed to turn Ocado into “a brand for me” by creating “emotional and personal relevance”, according to strategy partner Dan Holt.

This means building a media plan that “deeply understood our audience and mirrored how they live, shop and feel, treating media as a real extension of the brand experience itself”, he explained.

One key insight the team leaned in to was the idea that grocery shopping is a ritual for everyone as a way of bringing calm to their busy lives.

Holt continued: “So we asked ourselves: what would it mean to deliver life through media? That question defined our planning approach.”

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Sharpening the plan

For the “Life Delivered” campaign, Havas wanted high-attention channels such as TV, cinema and YouTube to create brand feeling and memorability, while print and OOH would provide a “physical presence” to mirror consumers’ routines, such as on commuter roads and in Sunday newspapers.

Elsewhere, Father’s Day print features and reactive Wimbledon ads sought to create customer loyalty.

Finally, to leverage Ocado’s reputation as a tech brand, Havas looked to podcasts and scannable print ads.

But the agency went further. It turned to propensity modelling to categorise the UK population into five segments based on their likelihood of using Ocado. The approach fused Ocado’s first-party data with Havas’ Converged platform and YouGov attitudinal insights.

Based on this data, the media plan decided on VOD buys against specific shows and genres that matched the viewing behaviour of high-propensity groups and TV buys shifted from simply “ABC1 adults” to “ABC1 35-54s” to sharpen reach. YouTube and Meta were used to activate those same segments.

Meanwhile, OOH and audio activity was shaped by listening habits, locations and mindset of high-value audiences. In particular, podcasts were a crucial pillar because they were found to strongly resonate with this cohort.

Sparking connection

The campaign has exceeded the agency’s benchmarks, according to Holt.

First, its VOD buying approach was found to have delivered 40% more impressions compared with traditional demographic buying.

OOH, meanwhile, generated a 6% uplift in spontaneous awareness across the ABC1 35-54s group.

Radio activity delivered 40% ad recall against a 35% benchmark, while podcasts performed even more strongly: Havas found a 74% recall on host-read ads.

For Holt, every media choice on the plan connected to Ocado’s core proposition of reliably delivering what people need when they need it.

“From Jessie Ware and Gabby Logan in our Life Unpacked podcast with Acast and The Observer to Amelia Dimoldenberg’s month-long YouTube takeover, we used talent and trusted editorial partners to tell real, unscripted stories rooted in food, routine and emotion,” he explained.

“It showed what media can really do: take a creative idea and explode it across formats, partners and moments in ways that deepen meaning, spark genuine connection and make shopping easy.”