[JUDGING] Daybreak
Section: Best Multiplatform Campaign - Paid
Organisation Name: Daybreak
Campaign Questions
Name Of Brand Client
Daybreak
Campaign Name
The Demon of Daybreak (Halloween 2025). Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube Shorts.
Personpeople Who Led This Campaign
MXB Agency
Do You Use Alt Text In Your Images And Caption Your Videos
Video is captioned as standard across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. Alt text is not currently applied to still images. That's a gap and we're not going to pretend otherwise. It becomes a required field on the publishing checklist for every static asset from the 2026 campaigns onward.
What Objective For Campaign
Halloween 2025 was the first peak moment of a new strategy: build a universe of characters Daybreak owns.
The timing carries weight. Kantar calls the Halloween to Christmas run Ireland's golden shopping period, and it opens with Irish shoppers spending an additional €67.6m on groceries in October alone.
Daybreak's objective had two parts.
First, add to the Daybreak Universe. Halloween had to leave the brand with a character worth bringing back a year later, and prove out
the shift from creator-fronted seasonal work to a cast Daybreak owns.
Second, be played rather than scrolled past. Halloween creative defaults to scare. Daybreak's is built on comedy, because comedy gets replayed. Jeff, a hapless new hire fumbling through his first shift, carries the whole Daybreak family inside one running joke: 9 Grams Coffee, Munch & Co Deli, Lickety Split ice cream and Big Night In snacking. One story instead of four spots.
Underneath both sat the commercial job: grow Daybreak's share of voice across the Halloween season.
Daybreak's own 2024 data showed the creator-led work drove higher shares. The call was to build the character's equity anyway, because a creator deal ends with the contract and Jeff comes back next year.
Outline Your Strategy For This Campaign
Daybreak has spent years building a position at Halloween, and every season's learnings feed the next one.
Read against Kantar's Irish grocery data and our own platform reporting, three things stood out. The category competes on promotion, 21.9% of value on deal, the highest since June 2025, so a price message is least distinctive in the week everyone runs one. Growth comes from more trips than bigger baskets, frequency up 2.6% in October, in Daybreak's own-brand categories. Each channel does a different job: TikTok the youngest room, 44.9% aged 18-24 and entirely Irish; Instagram a 25-34 core; Facebook the older, broader base; YouTube Shorts the only one tipping male.
That pointed at salience over price, built on a recurring character. System1's IPA databank analysis puts character-led campaigns 30% more likely to deliver large profit gains, and worth 12 extra points of share of voice.
Casting came before writing. The performer had to hold Jeff across years of campaigns, because the audience buys the character before anything else. The story was written around the cast.
Everything was vertical-first: core rails for Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, plus high and low-fi TikToks. A hero teaser opened for fame, engagement formats ran key moments, and every asset carried the value message, saturating the campaign with value.
What Were The Outcomes For This Campaign Metrics Next Question
Against the first objective, the universe: Jeff arrived. The first character Daybreak owns outright, and the first of the recurring cast the Daybreak Universe is built on.
Against the second, being played rather than scrolled past: 9.6 million video views, up 42% on 2024. The Teaser was the strongest core film, with over 260,000 combined views across Facebook and Instagram. The best-performing asset in the whole campaign was Before and After Your Shift, the roughest and most TikTok-native cut in the set, with over 830,000 combined views. The scrappy one beat the cinematic one by more than three to one. The learning is the mix: the polished hero film opens the campaign and earns the fame moment, the rough native cuts carry the volume, and running both is what brings the audience with you.
Against the third, share of voice: the campaign reached 2.3 million people, up 48%, from 9.2 million impressions, up 29%. TikTok impressions nearly doubled, up 93% to 5.8 million, against an audience 44.9% aged 18-24 and entirely Irish. Facebook grew reach 45%.
The media approach bought breadth across this campaign, and the deeper view metrics moved with it. Every key result measure grew against a creator-fronted 2024, with a character Daybreak now owns.
All figures from campaign reporting across Meta, TikTok and YouTube.
What Are Your Metrics For This Campaign Real Metrics Please
Reach 2,327,492, up 48% year on year.
Impressions 9,226,564, up 29%.
Total video views 9,639,978, up 42%.
Cost per video view fell 31%.
Is There Anything Else You Want To Add Be Brief
Halloween 2025 was the first part of an annual plan to build the Daybreak Universe: recurring characters the brand owns and brings back season after season.
The risk sat in the timing. Creators were still delivering when they moved to a supporting role, and the character replacing them at the front had no audience of his own, launched at a peak trading moment. When pressure is on, most brands in this category lean harder on borrowed fame.
That is the innovation as much as the prosthetics are: a convenience retailer choosing to build its own intellectual property, and treating a seasonal campaign as an asset that carries into the next one rather than a cost that ends with the flight.
The campaign also changed how the next one is bought. Weekly auto-optimisation concentrated budget behind the earliest performers, so spend moves to a fixed allocation per post, giving every asset a guaranteed run, with a reserve held back to up-weight whatever the audience picks.