Real-Time Brand Journalism Campaign supporting Iceland’s sponsorship of ITV’s I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!

On Saturday 15^th November, News UK Commercial is launching a ground breaking real-time brand journalism unit with a native advertising campaign from Iceland in association with The Sun newspaper.

The Iceland campaign is the first to come out of News UK Commercial’s new native advertising unit, The Newsroom, which launches today. News UK won the brief to amplify Iceland’s sponsorship of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! with an inventive and ambitious three week campaign featuring news reactive native content that will be created the day before publication.

The campaign creative involves two puppets, Bush (a grub) and Tucker (a snake). Bush and Tucker will be commenting on The Sun’s editorial coverage of I’m a Celeb and all the action from the show. The commentary will appear as advertising from Iceland but will be written in The Sun’s tone of voice. Tiffanie Darke, who heads up The Newsroom, will be sitting in on The Sun’s daily news conference to identify opportunities for the sock puppets to write about the celebs’ antics in the jungle.

Bush and Tucker will have their own Twitter handle, @BushAndTucker, and will be tweeting live during the shows and posting on The Sun's Facebook page. The sock puppets will also be filmed outside Iceland stores where they will ask customers to test Iceland’s I'm a Celeb exotic meat selection pack, which includes ostrich, crocodile and kangaroo.

Nick Canning, Joint Managing Director of Iceland, commented:

The UK food retail market is more competitive than ever, so it is vital that we make the most of our advertising spend to achieve a real impact on consumers. News UK has come up with an adventurous campaign that we can’t wait to see in print.

Tiffanie Darke, Content Director for News UK’s The Newsroom, added:

We have a strong commercial relationship with Iceland but this campaign takes that relationship one stage further. We are using our newsroom capabilities to help them be agile and dynamic in how they use The Sun to reach their customers. Iceland is a confident and creative partner and we’re looking forward to working together on this ground breaking campaign.

Since we announced plans to launch a native advertising unit, the response from clients and agencies has been extremely positive and we are already working on a number of exciting briefs in addition to the one from Iceland. We will be announcing more innovative campaigns over the coming months as well as a number of key strategic hires to the team.

David Dinsmore, editor, The Sun, said:

This is a great example of a new way of editorial working more closely with commercial partners like Iceland.

The Newsroom has been created with an ambition to raise the bar on the quality of commercial content produced at News UK.  As part of the largest newspaper publisher, the unit will look to lead the market in identifying and developing new ways in which brands can leverage the relationship  News UK’s titles have with their readers.