Matalan has grown as a brand to become one of the UK’s most popular high street fashion retailers with an eye on value for money. The brand has recently been taken in a new direction and media integration is of the upmost importance. In the run up to Christmas, they advertise heavily across TV, press and radio, with this in mind, navy&grey were chosen to write and produce the national Christmas radio creative campaign.

To carry the brand associations across from the TV and print campaign to the radio, we took the obvious and simple steps of using the same voiceover and music as the Television ads. But what differentiates the Matalan Christmas campaign from their competitors, is the feel of the creative, and it was important that we transposed the feel of the TV and print creative into the matching radio spots.

The voiceover on the TV spot has warmth and vulnerability that reflects the assurance of the campaign. To make sure we achieved this with the radio campaign, careful copy writing was needed to ensure that, while the creative does promote offers, it isn’t simply an end-to-end list of products.

Conveying the brand is the key enabling Matalan to continue building on it in the future. With time purposefully built into the radio copy to allow the voiceover to relax and deliver the read used in the TV commercials, where she only needs to deliver a sentence, we’ve given the radio campaign the breathing space it needs to function as both a traditional ‘selling’ retail campaign, and also as an effective brand building exercise.