Eat the world during NE1’s Restaurant Week

60,000 diners attracted generating over £1.2m economic impact for the city

Overview: A FRESH TASTE FOR RESTAURANT WEEK

NE1 is the Business Improvement District Company on a mission to make the best city in the world – Newcastle – even better. O was appointed as NE1’s creative agency in 2024, to support its marketing team in showcasing Newcastle as a vibrant, unique and culture filled city, encouraging people to visit more, stay longer and engage in more activities to help the city to thrive.

Central to this is NE1’s free to attend events and campaigns, including Newcastle Restaurant Week, Screen on the Green, Summer in the City and Newcastle’s Christmas, all of which have become much-loved fixtures in the city’s events calendar.

Observatory – who’s in our world?

O devised the creative strategy for each campaign, giving them a completely fresh direction. Each campaign began with a detailed strategy, considering our audience insights, the latest consumer trends and data, and shifting media habits to lead us to impactful creative concepts to work across both digital and OOH platforms.

Original Thinking – EAT THE WORLD

Newcastle’s Restaurant Week had been a firm date in the diary for diners for thirteen years, with previous campaigns centring on price-led offers from participating restaurants. Awareness of Restaurant Week was not the issue; we identified that driving traffic to a wide variety of restaurants throughout the whole week was our growth opportunity.

Our creative strategy was not just to eat out during Restaurant Week, but to ‘Eat the World’. With participating restaurants growing over the years from just 13 to over 120 today, diners can now chose from Chinese banquets to Indian street food, Persian feasts to Japanese Sushi, Italian pizza to Greek mezze.

Our campaign wanted to stop the scroll on social, halt people in the streets and get friends crazily WhatsApping each other to secure diary dates to ensure they ate out as many times as possible with such variety and value on offer.

OMNIVERSE – the brand world

We developed a new NE1 Restaurant Week brand world that could live across channels, from social content to OOH and IRL activations.

We chose to move away from previous photographic imagery to introduce ownable illustrated assets to NE1’s brand, that could be used in future campaigns as recognisable identities. In addition, we wanted to subtly place local iconography into the design to provide some local visual markers.

A series of four assets were created for launch, featuring a hero asset of all cuisines and creative to support Asian, Italian and Greek cuisine.

Outreach – Making It Real

Working closely with the media buying company, we created a complete suite of assets for placements across OOH such as bus stops and metro carriage cards, digital and social static and animated graphics and materials for participating restaurants to use for promotion.

Working with O has elevated our campaigns, and by extension our city centre events, to another level. Their creative routes have been fresh, vibrant, and with levels of detail which made the assets must-see. Their work celebrated the city both organisations love, and the results have been excellent. We can’t wait to begin on the next iterations as we continually strive for improvement and growth.

Ben Whitfield, Director of Communications at Newcastle NE1