Project Description

Now in its 11th year, the much-loved Tesco Christmas CES continued to grow and to impress!

The event takes place at a critical time in the sales calendar when all focus is on ensuring the success of the Christmas season across all channels, in store and online.

Once again held at the Celtic Manor, the event brought together 900 delegates over two, two-day events but this year was no repeat of 2014!

TMB’s Solution

The Tesco Christmas CES was bigger and more innovative then ever. Throughout the event planning work, we never lost sight of Tesco’s commercial objectives: to increase sales in store by giving staff the tools and knowledge to push sales of strategic products over the Christmas period.

Product is king! And we have acknowledged this in the shape and size of the exhibition space, which this year was bigger than ever. We set up a marquee in the back of the exhibition hall to house all the Small Domestic Appliances. “The event is getting bigger and bigger. We’ve taken over the entire hotel and its grounds and we extended the building with the marquee so that we can increase exhibitors spaces from 32 exhibitions suppliers in 2014 to 45 in 2015,” explains Sarah Moore, Account Manager, TMB Events.

“We have also transformed part of the hotel into a Tesco store to show how to merchandise key products,” Sarah explains. “The focus was on product feature demonstrations and customer interactions, display techniques and re-stocking.”

We tried to bring in an element of gamification and interactivity, as the exhibition was animated by the iPad challenge, where delegates used their individual event iPad to scan QR codes, answer questions and accumulate points which were exchanged at the end for some robust prizes (including large plasma TVs, hoovers and other coveted household goods).

The conference which followed the exhibition module was host to a range of celebrities such as: Tom Jones, Amy Childs, Caroline Flack, Nigel Mansell, Darcy the Illusionist, James Morrison… and the heart-warming performance from the Tesco Charity Band.

Hoverboards were all the rage and were used on stage even by Darcy the Illusionist!  But be under no illusion, the hoverboards went on to become the most talked about Christmas gift so we now know we were on the right track… even in October.

The experience of high profile guests stood our colleagues in TMB Entertainment in good stead as they supported the teams within Tesco responsible for books & DVD procurement and the guest celebrities.

Any headaches that weren’t induced by the massive choice in the technology area, were probably given by the loud and heavy partying lead by the Ministry of Sound into the early hours…

The Outcome

Since our last accolade for Tesco Christmas CES was “best one ever” we thought we should go for a repeat. The good news: we did it! We’re now already planning layouts, formats and interactivity for 2016 CES. Every year, clever use of technology makes all our ideas possible and we’re pretty lucky to have such a large canvas for our event! Testing, testing, already.’