Tesco, McDonald's and M&S serve up Wimbledon winners

Wimbledon is a great stress test for brands with no official sponsorship rights vying for cultural relevance, says Serge Vaezi, co-founder and creative director at SEVEN Communications.

This year I’ve picked three brands all reaching for the same two ingredients (strawberries and cream, of course) as great examples proving that cultural relevance does not automatically require outlandish or irreverent ideas. 

Wimbledon is, after all, a quintessentially British affair and these brands all seem to recognise that restraint is the order of the day. 

Tesco’s Strawberries & Cream van is the simplest of my three admired activations. 

An ice cream van rebadged and parked near Wimbledon station, giving away free bowls of strawberries and cream whilst stocks last. No app or scan-to-win nonsense, just the product in exactly the spot where thousands of hungry, sunburnt and Instagram-ready tennis fans were already walking past. 

The activation leans into its ‘Need anything from Tesco?’ platform, a nod to the supermarket’s prevalence over our everyday moments. This is exactly the type of UGC friendly activations that OSCAR’s judgement is built on. 

McDonald’s came in strong with a play on a common consumer behaviour; to dip or not to dip.

I’m partial to a chip in a strawberry milkshake, and Leo UK’s trick was simply to notice it, name it, box it and shoot it like a high-fashion campaign. 

A limited-edition ‘Shake n’ Serve box for one day only at the Wimbledon restaurant, styled with the kind of luxe you’d expect from a tennis brand rather than a fast-food chain. It’s a nice example of a brand staying true to itself and its consumers, whilst still doing something unexpected. 

M&S deserves some credit too.

Last year's Red Diamond Strawberry & Crème sandwich went viral off the back of Japan's fruit sando trend, sold 75,000 units in five days, and picked up a HMRC tax spat along the way. 

This year, they’ve bought the original back along with a new chocolate-meets-strawberry-meets-pistachio combo that feels ripe for virality. A great exercise in harnessing novelty and building on what’s known to work. 

What ties these three together is that none of them needed a huge production budget; just the confidence to stay in character whilst everyone else is scrambling for a Wimbledon tie-in. That’s the gap to measure; not whether a single activation landed, but whether a brand stays recognisably itself when culture moves fast.