Carrefour Italy

The Objective 

Winning consumers in a competitive marketplace with the right creative agency

A household name for more than half a century, the Carrefour Group is one of the most important distribution groups in the world, operating in Italy with approximately 1,200 points of sale. Eager to innovate and activate its Italian audience, Carrefour Italy struggled to create ad hoc native content on TikTok. Enter TikTok Creative Exchange (TTCX).

TTCX is a platform dedicated to pairing brands (like Carrefour) with creative partners —  offering a single place for effective content production, seamless collaboration and full-view campaign insights. Aiming to raise awareness and drive website traffic, Carrefour Italy leveraged TTCX for a culturally-specific campaign that would impact the public with maximum effect.

The Solution

Pre-bear-ing for success with the perfect partner 

Carrefour Italy was committed to delivering a truly engaging campaign which would reflect its global legacy. This meant the brand’s renowned reputation would inform the choice of agency – as well as the campaign’s originality, creativity and scale. As Carrefour Italy wanted to be an early adopter of digital art, TikTok Creative Exchange partnered it with creative agency Joli Berlin. Having just launched its Digital Art package, Joli Berlin was the ideal agency to help Carrefour Italy achieve its aim of engaging TikTok users and driving them to the website. With captivating 3D-rendered visuals and collaborative storytelling, Joli’s innovative package provided the brand with a genuine opportunity for transformation – something Carrefour Italy fully maximised to ensure utmost impact.

Targeting a broad audience, the brand’s multi-channel campaign, Spesa Grattis, encouraged consumers to scratch a lottery ticket to win groceries and vouchers. Basing their concept on a a television commercial that featured an enormous (and profoundly itchy) bear, Carrefour Italy and Joli crafted a series of playful videos that intrigued and entertained TikTok audiences.

By combining cultural nuance and clever wordplay – tweaking the word ‘gratis’, meaning free, to grattis to resemble the Italian word for ‘scratch’ – they leveraged a nation’s fascination with a bear that dares to use iconic Italian landmarks to scratch its back.

To bring the vision to life, Joli’s digital artist used texture mapping and motion tracking to animate the bear and finalise the videos into a whimsical, fun-loving series that captured the spirit of the campaign and piqued the interest of TikTokers. 

Expertly capitalising on the success of the series, Carrefour Italy leveraged Campaign Budget Optimisation to allocate further budget to the best performing videos. Thanks to TTCX, Carrefour Italy found the right creative partner to ensure its first foray into native TikTok content rivalled competitors – and yielded serious results for the global brand.

The Results 

Harnessing cultural insight to drive commercial success

With a compelling incentive and culturally-specific hook at its core, the TTCX partnership not only elevated Carrefour Italy’s presence in the digital realm. A departure from the brand’s typical advertisements, this campaign exceeded expectations, piquing the attention of multiple demographics, encouraging engagement and driving website traffic.

Over the course of four weeks, Carrefour Italy’s campaign drove a 0.50% CTR exceeding TikTok’s benchmark – entertaining 3.8 million people in the process. Furthermore, it boosted engagement by +57% as well as achieving an 18% 2s view-through rate (VTR) and 6.42% 6s VTR against TikTok’s 7.65% and 1.99% benchmarks, respectively.