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As one of the fastest-growing brands in tubbed ice cream, Mackie’s had momentum. But retail buyers needed proof that this was the sustainable start of something special to keep their spot on the supermarket shelves outside Scotland. Outspent by the deep pockets of Ben & Jerry’s and other frozen giants, Mackie’s had to outmanoeuvre by teaming up with a marketing partner that could meet their tactical needs. Cue Lane.
Insight
Facing a category dominated by price promotion, private label growth and national advertising heavyweights, Mackie’s needed to move from being chosen on promotion, to being chosen on difference and brand recognition.
In a saturated market dominated by frozen giants, differentiation is everything. For Mackie’s, that meant leading with their real cream advantage. Where some competitors relied on powdered alternatives, Mackie’s ice cream delivers real, creamy goodness.
With both our media and creative teams on the case, we mixed up a plan to strengthen brand awareness and recruit new shoppers to drive growth and secure new listings across the UK, all while making sure that Mackie’s is known as the creamiest ice cream around.
We identified Northwest England as the perfect, untapped test area for targeted media as well as planning a national rollout that aimed to prove to retailers across the UK that Mackie’s are serious tubbed contenders.
Idea
Born from a rallying cry that celebrates real ingredients, we turned a simple product truth into a bold, memorable call, bringing Mackie’s velvety real cream to life. No powdered promises, just pure dairy delight.
The creative was tested with our OOH partner JC Decaux’s AI powered Optix eye-tracking to ensure we got the message across from first glance. On the metric that mattered – “Is the campaign getting focused, impactful attention?” – we scored 4.5/5 for the Traditional flavour, and 4.2/5 for Honeycomb. Our creative was the highest scoring from a Scottish agency as recorded by JC Decaux’s tracking tool ever – giving us a flavour of the success to come.
Full Cream Ahead targeted consumers with a clear, creamy message. Using Circana ePOS data, we targeted ice cream buyers with programmatic mobile, proximity OOH and front-of-store retail OOH. We also ran national retailer campaigns across co-branded Shopper Social Meta ads, in-store scan-as-you-shop (SAYS) across Tesco and programmatic proximity via Blis.
Shoppers and buyers couldn’t resist our tasty creative lever and meticulously targeted media planning.
Impact
Full Cream Ahead proved the proof really is in the pudding. With cream-of-the-crop-creative, we didn’t just deliver an impactful campaign, we delivered against every target and then some. It was a textbook example of creative and precision media working together to exceed expectations.
The media planning was tightly aligned with retail conversion and sales uplift. Across the UK, Mackie’s won more than 300,000 new buyers compared to the previous year.
Prompted awareness grew nationwide, reaching 40% across the UK and soaring to over 90% in Mackie’s home Scottish market. Brand associations of ‘Made with real milk and cream’ increased by almost 40% and unprompted awareness in Northwest England almost doubled, showing the depth of impact of our test region marketing investment.
Retailers heard the rallying cry and committed, with Mackie’s landing on 2,110 more retail store shelves in 2025 – helping them achieve double-digit year-on-year growth. Even better, we tripled the growth of their gold tubbed rival, taking us well ahead of the market which grew by 7.6%.
Stuart Common, the Managing Director of Mackie’s commented that: “The month of July saw impressive results, selling over 1,900,000 litres of ice cream, our best results in the history of the company. That’s enough ice cream to fill over 15,000 bathtubs or our local Inverurie swimming pool three times over.”
A freshly baked new product launch
View Case Study A freshly baked new product launch