Potato Advertising Push gets underway in United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, a high profile advertising campaign has been launched to drive awareness and sales of named potato varieties. The programme of activity, which will see messaging span consumer focused print and digital media channels, is being rolled out by Potato Council as part of its £350k autumn campaign, incorporating Potato Week (7-13 October).

Targeted to reach some 60% of the UK’s female shoppers with children, advertorials will appear in key lifestyle titles, such as Heat, Closer and Hello! as well as food oriented magazines including BBC Good Food, Olive and Weight Watchers from 30 September to 20 October. This is supported by banner advertising across high traffic website sites and content-driven platforms such as Taboola, Ad2One and Facebook.

Activity will be intensified for the duration of Potato Week, with daily recipe endorsement from celebrity chef Jo Pratt, helping to increase traffic to www.lovepotatoes.co.uk.

Potato Council marketing manager, Kate Cox, said: “The autumn is a crucial time for potato consumption and the crux of our campaign – which is timed to coincide with main crop harvesting – is to encourage shoppers to trade up to popular named varieties. In doing so, we aim to promote increased consistency and enjoyment of potato-meals eaten in the home and encourage shoppers to see that they are worth paying a little more for. This in turn, will drive value growth of the potato category.

“The activity has been carefully researched to ensure that not only do the adverts and messages resonate with mums, a regular presence in high indexing titles and channels will fully engrain them. This is crucial in order to reach our objectives of achieving a 5% shift in attitudes and see more mums buying named varieties this autumn.”

As well as advertising activity, the autumn campaign will see the introduction of on-pack messaging in selected retailers and both national and regional PR generated awareness.

For more information, or - if you are in the UK- to request promotional material (including stickers and artwork) or for additional ways to introduce your own activity and messaging, contact marketing@potato.ahdb.org.uk or visit www.potato.org.uk/promotion/get-involved