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Marmite First Timers Targets Young Adults With Playful Provocation
Marmite's "First Timers" is a 2023 integrated campaign created by adam&eveDDB for Marmite and Unilever, launching in the United Kingdom in October 2023, designed to drive first-time trial of the iconic yeast extract spread among UK adults aged 18 to 24 through humour, suggestive storytelling, and a multi-platform activation timed to coincide with university Freshers' week.
The campaign exists because of a startling consumer insight. According to YouGov research commissioned ahead of the campaign, 43% of UK adults aged 18 to 24 had never tried Marmite — a statistic that reframed the brand's challenge not as one of preference but of reach. Marmite is one of the most recognisable food products in the United Kingdom, yet nearly half of the generation that will define its next decade of relevance had simply never encountered it on a plate. The strategic imperative was clear: turn non-triers into first-timers.
The campaign's tagline, "Love it. Hate it. Get it on.", is a direct evolution of Marmite's long-standing love-or-hate brand platform, first developed with adam&eveDDB and sustained across more than a decade of award-winning work. "First Timers" extends that binary identity into a new register — one that courts young adults on their own cultural terms, using innuendo, social media mechanics, and channel choices that speak directly to the Freshers' week moment. The integrated campaign spans television, TikTok, and Tinder, supplemented by physical sampling kits distributed at universities across the United Kingdom, making it one of the more structurally complete youth recruitment campaigns in the UK food and drink category in 2023. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 72 out of 100, reflecting strong creative craft and strategic clarity against a competitive integrated field.
Marmite's strategic insight centres on a single, well-evidenced gap between brand fame and brand trial. The YouGov research finding — that 43% of UK 18-to-24-year-olds had never tried Marmite, as cited across coverage by Muse by Clios and Creative Boom — recast a mature, heritage-led category problem as a recruitment opportunity with a natural cultural hook. Freshers' week in the United Kingdom is an annual moment defined by first experiences, and the "First Timers" campaign treats that cultural truth as its entire creative premise rather than a passing reference.
As reported by Muse by Clios, brand manager Laura Iliffe stated that the strategic objective was driving trial and recruiting a new generation of Marmite users — a goal that distinguishes this campaign from the brand's more habitual work reinforcing the love-or-hate divide among existing consumers. The yeast-based spreads market is characterised by industry analysts as mature and heritage-led, and Marmite competes in the United Kingdom alongside products such as Vegemite, which holds strong recognition among UK consumers with Australian heritage, and Bovril, another Unilever-owned savoury spread that occupies adjacent shelf space. In a category where familiarity often calcifies into inertia, targeting lapsed or never-tried audiences through earned cultural moments represents a demonstrably different strategic posture.
The choice of Tinder as a platform amplifies the innuendo-led creative while targeting a demographic that is, by definition, present and engaged on dating applications during early university life in the United Kingdom. The TikTok challenge element, "Are you a Marmite First-Timer?", introduces participatory mechanics that extend reach beyond paid media. Together these choices reflect a media strategy built around behavioural context rather than pure demographic targeting — placing the brand where young UK adults are already making decisions about what they want to try for the first time.
The hero film for "First Timers" runs to 60 seconds. Directed by Guy Shelmerdine through production company SMUGGLER, the film features two puppets navigating the experience of eating Marmite on toast for the very first time, guided through a series of instructions — "stroke that", "push that", "lick that" — that are deliberately and playfully suggestive in register. The comedic architecture depends entirely on the gap between the innocent domestic act being described and the language used to describe it, a classic double-entendre construction that Marmite and adam&eveDDB deploy with precision rather than clumsiness.
The creative team behind the campaign, as documented by Little Black Book Online, comprised Ben Tollet, Colin Booth, and Ben Stilitz. Editing was handled by Saam Hodivala at Shift Post, with post-production delivered by Absolute Post under senior post producer Kirsty Ratcliffe. Design came from King Henry Studios, and the production was coordinated by producer Amelia Hanbury. The film's soundtrack is a specially recorded remix of the Giraffage track "Workout", produced by the US-based electronic music artist Giraffage — a choice that grounds the spot in a contemporary sonic register without the expense or formality of a major-label sync.
As noted by It's Nice That and Creative Boom in their coverage of the campaign, the puppet format allows the film to occupy an ambiguous tonal space: neither fully adult nor entirely innocent. That ambiguity is structurally important. It permits the innuendo to land while keeping the campaign well within broadcast standards for a food product airing on UK television. The 60-second spot first aired on 3 October 2023, according to coverage by Muse by Clios, with the broader integrated campaign — including the Tinder "Sticky Situations" quiz and TikTok activations — running in parallel across the United Kingdom.
No independently verified sales or trial-uplift data for the Marmite "First Timers" campaign is publicly available at the time of writing. What is documented is the campaign's reception and reach at the asset level. According to Clapboard's own editorial records, the hero film accumulated 47,180 views and 385 likes, with 83 comments — figures that reflect meaningful organic engagement for a food and drink brand campaign in the United Kingdom without accounting for paid broadcast and social reach across the full integrated campaign.
The structural effectiveness of "First Timers" is readable from its channel architecture. A 60-second television film creates mass awareness while the TikTok challenge generates participatory reach among exactly the 18-to-24 demographic identified in the YouGov pre-campaign research. The Tinder quiz adds a contextually resonant touchpoint that invites active categorisation — love or hate — which mirrors the brand's core identity mechanism. University sampling kits close the loop by converting campaign awareness into physical product trial, addressing the 43% non-trier statistic that justified the campaign's existence in the first place. As noted by Famous Campaigns in its coverage, the campaign's ambition was to reposition Marmite as approachable and intriguing to a generation that had simply never engaged with it. Each channel serves a distinct role in that conversion funnel.
The campaign was recognised in industry coverage by Muse by Clios, It's Nice That, Little Black Book Online, and Creative Boom as a notable example of integrated humour-led brand work in the UK food industry in 2023. Its creative lineage — extending a platform developed with adam&eveDDB over more than a decade — gives it the brand coherence that one-off campaign ideas typically lack.
Marmite's First Timers is a 2023 integrated campaign by adam&eveDDB, launched in the United Kingdom in October 2023. It targets UK adults aged 18 to 24 who have never tried Marmite, using a suggestive 60-second puppet film, a Tinder quiz, a TikTok challenge, and university sampling kits timed to Freshers' week.
YouGov research found that 43% of UK adults aged 18 to 24 had never tried Marmite. That finding, cited by Muse by Clios and Creative Boom, revealed a trial gap rather than a preference problem. The campaign was designed to recruit first-time users from a generation that had not yet encountered the brand.
Guy Shelmerdine directed the First Timers hero film. Shelmerdine worked through production company SMUGGLER, with editing by Saam Hodivala at Shift Post and post-production by Absolute Post. The creative team at adam&eveDDB included Ben Tollet, Colin Booth, and Ben Stilitz, as documented by Little Black Book Online.
The tagline for Marmite's First Timers campaign is "Love it. Hate it. Get it on." It extends the brand's long-running love-or-hate platform while introducing a tone of innuendo suited to recruiting young UK adults during Freshers' week 2023, as reported by Muse by Clios and Creative Boom.
The Marmite First Timers film uses a specially recorded remix of "Workout" by US electronic music producer Giraffage. The track was remixed specifically for the campaign, giving the 60-second spot a contemporary sonic identity aligned with the 18-to-24 target audience in the United Kingdom, according to campaign documentation cited by Muse by Clios.
First Timers extends a brand platform adam&eveDDB and Marmite have developed for over a decade. Previous campaigns include the 2018 Gene Project, the 2019 Mind Control work, and the 2013 End Marmite Neglect spot, as noted by It's Nice That and D&AD, all of which built on the same love-or-hate brand identity.
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