The Creative Vehicle- 'Where Everything's Done Proper'

Standard Black Tea is an incredibly habitual market, with people buying the brand they grew up with for the rest of their lives. Our challenge was to disrupt this and convince them to switch to Yorkshire Tea.

Visiting the Yorkshire Tea Factory we were struck by the effort the company put into making a better brew. They tasted 1000 cups a day, sourced only the best leaves from their suppliers and generally avoided cutting corners. This was summed up by the motto ‘We do things proper’, which hung upon their factory wall.

We liked this philosophy of doing things proper, and set out to make it culturally famous. But knowing that a lecture on tea making would bore the British public, we instead joked that Yorkshire Tea was a place where everything was done proper. And to prove this we hired some of Yorkshire’s most famously talented celebrities to do menial tasks around the Yorkshire Tea HQ… Sir Michael Parkinson, the legendary talk show host, was brought in to interview potential employees, famous Yorkshire Band The Kaiser Chiefs played the hold music live in reception and the Olympic gold-medal- winning Brownlee Brothers became the firm’s new couriers. In later executions the magician Dynamo levitated packets of tea down from lofty shelves and Sean Bean gave an inspiring induction to new arrivals at the company.

New product launches done proper

Running from 2017 to 2022, Where everything’s done proper has extended beyond brand advertising and built incredible momentum for the brand.

To promote Yorkshire’s Daypart brews we commissioned the Yorkshire poet Ian Macmillan to write radio poems that would give listeners a proper morning wake-up or a proper bedtime send-off.

When the clients told us they were creating a Biscuit Brew (a tea that tastes like biscuits) we created a proper launch stunt in the form of the world’s longest domino biscuit rally, which we built for real in their factory.

And when they went one better and came up with a Toast and Jam flavoured brew, we developed a reactive campaign across social, OOH, print and Spotify that featured the horrified responses of tea traditionalists and joked that the new brew was ‘Proper Out There’.

Socially distanced teapot

This robust brand platform and the clarity that it brings has been particularly crucial during COVID-19, when many other brands were struggling to determine their role, Yorkshire Tea never put a foot wrong. For instance we created a ‘Socially distanced teapot’ with a two metre long spout to ensure safe brew-making when workers were allowed back to their offices.

Where everything's (still) done proper

In 2022, we helped to achieve record sales, with a little help from proper legend Sir Patrick Stewart.