The Weekly Shop Has Got Complicated, But ALDI Ireland’s Keeping It Simple

​ALDI Ireland’s new campaign by Pablo seeks to make one thing clear – living a good life is simple. In a world of endless choice, social media dominance and increasingly gloomy headlines, where even the weekly food shop can feel like a battle, their message ‘it’s not complicated’ is a reassuring one.

The TV advert is a tongue-in-cheek look at ALDI’s unnamed competitors and the ways they justify hiking their prices by providing customers with an in-store cheesemonger, products displayed in bespoke wicker baskets and a clothing range too. Which is all very well, but sometimes you just need a tin of tomatoes.

Joan Devereux, planning director at Pablo, tells LBB how elaborate the shopping experience in Ireland has become. “It's quite a sophisticated market, but actually what the competitors were doing over there was making the whole shopping experience really complicated,” she says. “So there's loads of choice. There's lots of quite complicated mechanics in terms of loyalty schemes and discounts. And people don't want to have a calculator when they go into the store to work out where they’re getting value.”

Simple doesn’t have to mean lacking in quality though, as Joan adds. “The brilliant thing about what ALDI does is that it has great value products. It's got so many great homegrown Irish products and everything is delivered in a really streamlined simple way. So you know what the price is. You don't have to go through millions of different choices and they make the whole experience really easy, really simple and really straightforward. They're giving you great value and they're giving you a great price. I think when you think about the benefit for customers, they're helping you achieve that good life that you aspire to.”

The tone of the TV spot journeys from the ridiculous into the sublime on one woman’s journey to buy some tinned tomatoes for her bolognese. A sultry man tucking into a plate of meatballs leads into a flash mob of dancing tomatoes and a carnival-esque supermarket packed with extraneous characters. Pablo knows who ALDI’s competitors are but the agency is keen that it should be laughing with them, not at them.

Pablo CEO Gareth Mercer explains, “It unlocked a tone where the brand could feel like a friend that you're having a laugh with at the nonsense out there. It allowed us to punch up at the competition, never punching down to local retailers or things like that.

“All we want really is the good life. And ALDI really focuses on the good life and that's why you go from the subplot, the ridiculous into the sensibleness.

“If the constant outside your front door is change, when we get home we want that bit to be good. We want that to be enjoyable. We know the cost of living has gone up, but we want quality because the good life is about togetherness, moments, but equally quality produce. That allowed us to create that vehicle.”

Creating the campaign for ALDI in Ireland was also significant, as Pablo was able to tap into what makes the Irish tick.

“We did a lot of research in Ireland with customers over there,” says Joan. “It probably sounds obvious, but a couple of things about the Irish in terms of personality traits, they're really straight talking and they've got a pretty good sense of humour. So when you point out these kinds of things to them with a bit of a wink, they're immediately on your side a little bit. They get it.”

With the campaign’s combination of wit, silliness and common sense Pablo hopes it will make customers “fall in love with ALDI again”.

There are plenty of fun Easter eggs dotted throughout the spot – particular highlights being a ‘live laugh lentils’ sign and a man posing with a pair of swans casually held under his arm. These details come courtesy of DROOL Productions, who produced the TV spot and according to Gareth their skills enabled the myriad ideas to come to life. “They're really great craft people when it comes to visual narrative,” he says.

There was a lot of room for details to sing in this project. “The level of depth and stuff like that just keeps coming from creative directors like Ed Redgrave, who just can't stop visually. You've got the choreography and then you've got the layering and layering just to get to that effect.”

The accompanying OOH campaign also adopts this irreverent approach with slogans such as ‘If your supermarket has a cheesemonger and a barista, you might be paying them too much’ written on vans parked outside some of ALDI’s biggest competitors.

From a strategy perspective, Joan is particularly happy with how the platform chimes with real people’s lives. ”It's a really true reflection of the business and it's also a platform that's going to reverberate throughout the business,” she says. “It's not just something that's going to be an ad line, it's actually something that is going to work at every level and something that they will deliver on every level as well.”