M&S Food: Using influencer reach and engagement to drive awareness across ‘Summer of Football’

The challenge

M&S is one of the UK’s most loved retailers, with a food brand that has built a strong connection with audiences and a reputation for doing food moments properly across social. 

Tournaments like The World Cup are busy moments for food and drink brands, all competing for the attention of fans watching at home. With feeds crowded with branded content, audiences are quick to scroll past anything that feels too much like an ad.

M&S wanted to cut through by promoting its range of food, deli and grill products for parties and matchday watch-alongs. The content needed to feel like a genuine recommendation, while exceeding the industry engagement rate benchmark of 3%. 

The overall goals of the campaign were to:

• Raise awareness of M&S’ food offering, keeping it front of mind during the summer of sports.
• Show how you can host and celebrate with exciting M&S Food products.   
• Ensure M&S Food is present in cultural conversations surrounding the tournament as a loved go-to brand.

Our approach

The M&S Matchday Picks campaign approach used two distinct creator tiers (macro and micro/mid-level) to do two different jobs, alongside spark ads to boost best performing content: 

• Familiar faces for reach: macro creators audiences already recognise, selected to put M&S in front of the largest possible football audience when interest in the tournament was at its highest. 
• Community voices for connection: micro and mid-level creators with smaller, engaged audiences who had built trust within their communities, helping the content feel like a genuine recommendation rather than a brand message.
• Briefs that stayed open: talent were kept on brief but given room to decide how the idea worked for their audience, including leaning into trending sounds and faster-paced edits.
• Branding in the first three seconds: the brand was made visible early and visually, making M&S immediately recognisable as audiences scrolled. 
• To-camera with subtitles: a spontaneous, relatable dialogue style.

The results

The combined organic and paid results across the four pieces of content delivered 60m views, 100k engagements, at an average engagement rate of 8%, 6 percentage points above the 3% industry benchmark. 

• The macro tier of creators delivered on reach: reinforcing their value within organic campaign moments.
• Top performing organic content was driven by trending sounds and fast paced creatives: the strongest results came from leaning into current trends and giving talent the freedom to evolve the brief, with one piece of content generating over 15,000 views in its first 48 hours. 
• Early brand visibility proved key to the performance: organic content that put the brand on screen within the first three seconds averaged an 8.62% engagement rate and 11.13% deep engagement, well ahead of content where branding arrived later.

The campaign’s success shows the value of pairing familiar faces with a well-established community, making the brand visible early, keeping content spontaneous and giving creators the freedom to make the brief their own. 

🎥  60m overall video views

❤️ 100k engagements