The goal was simple but ambitious: make Tesco the first choice for festive retail work across the UK and Ireland.

As with every Wiser campaign, we began with insight. Before developing creative or media plans, we grounded ourselves in research to understand what seasonal workers actually value, how they behave during peak hiring periods, and where Tesco needed to show up to stand out. One thing became clear… talent didn’t just want a job; they wanted to feel part of something. Culture, community and values mattered just as much as pay or flexibility, even on a short-term basis.

That insight shaped everything that followed. Our challenge was to translate Tesco’s familiar values into a festive-first creative that felt relatable, human and unmistakably Tesco. By weaving those values naturally into the content, with a seasonal twist, we created messaging that mirrored the warmth and energy of the festive period, while clearly communicating what makes Tesco different from other retailers.

From there, we built a fully integrated recruitment campaign designed to meet talent in their everyday lives. The campaign lived both inside and outside of Tesco stores, allowing us to reach potential candidates not just as job seekers, but as customers too. In-store tannoy announcements brought the campaign directly into shopping moments, while digital out-of-home placements across the UK and Ireland extended reach at scale. This was then amplified through paid social, driving talent directly to Tesco’s careers site. 

To ensure a seamless candidate journey, we directed traffic to a filtered festive roles experience, making it easy for candidates to quickly find relevant opportunities and apply. By combining high-impact creative with a multi-touchpoint media strategy, Tesco consistently showed up in the moments that mattered most by turning everyday festive interactions into real smiles in-store.