ARCHIVEOld El Paso Rallies Team GB Behind the Family Table
Old El Paso launched 'Make Some Noise for your Home Team' in the United Kingdom in April 2024, a multi-million pound campaign created with M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment that appointed four Team GB Olympic champions as Home Team Heroes and positioned shared mealtimes as the ultimate expression of national team spirit ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics.
The campaign centres on a cast of four decorated athletes: double Olympic swimming champion Tom Dean MBE, Olympic silver-medal-winning weightlifter Emily Campbell, Olympic diving champion and three-time medallist Jack Laugher MBE, and Olympic BMX racing champion Bethany Shriever MBE. Each athlete was designated a Home Team Hero, appearing on individual promotional Old El Paso retail packs available in-store from launch, with each pack carrying a personal tip from the athlete on how they bring their own flavour to an Old El Paso meal.
The campaign's central mechanic fuses brand building with consumer activation. A 30-second launch film, deployed across social and digital channels, frames eating as the ultimate team sport, showing each athlete competing in their discipline before coming together around an Old El Paso meal hosted by Tom Dean. In parallel, promotional packs across Old El Paso's portfolio gave consumers the chance to win VIP tickets to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, driving retail engagement alongside the broader brand narrative. Beyond digital and social, the campaign extended across radio, PR, shopper marketing, and on-pack promotion, as reported by mediapost.com and talkingretail.com, ensuring coverage from the supermarket shelf to the living-room screen. The choice of the United Kingdom as the sole geographic market reflects Old El Paso's ambition to embed the brand within the cultural moment that Team GB creates every Olympic cycle — a moment that, as noted by sponsorship.org, commands some of the highest levels of collective national attention in the British calendar.
ARCHIVEOld El Paso identified a strategic tension at the heart of the 2024 UK food and drink landscape. Mexican cuisine was recognised as one of the major food trends in the United Kingdom in 2024, with consumer demand for bold, flavourful, and accessible at-home meal solutions accelerating, according to tesco.com and edo.com. Old El Paso, owned by General Mills and occupying a leading position in the UK Tex-Mex grocery category as noted by owler.com, faced the challenge of converting category interest into genuine brand affinity rather than generic occasion purchase.
The strategic answer was to anchor Old El Paso not to a food occasion but to an emotional one. Team GB unites the United Kingdom around shared pride at a scale few other cultural properties can match. M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, operating as a specialist passions agency, identified that the connective tissue between an Olympic team and a shared family meal is identical: both are built on different individuals contributing their own strengths to a common table. That insight drives every executional choice in the campaign, from the athlete selection to the on-pack tips format to Tom Dean's role as the meal's host rather than simply its spokesperson.
Competitively, the move positions Old El Paso against broader meal-kit and Tex-Mex rivals such as Discovery Foods and Santa Maria, both of which compete for share in the UK ambient Mexican food aisle. By securing an exclusive partnership with Team GB and appointing athletes as named brand ambassadors with individual pack presence, Old El Paso creates a retail differentiation that neither competitor replicated during the Paris 2024 Olympic cycle. The multi-channel architecture — spanning digital, social, radio, PR, and shopper marketing, as documented by talkingretail.com and grocerytrader.co.uk — ensures the campaign works simultaneously at brand level and at the point of purchase, where category decisions are ultimately made.
The 30-second launch film sits at the creative heart of the 'Make Some Noise for your Home Team' campaign. The film opens with each Home Team Hero — Tom Dean MBE, Emily Campbell, Jack Laugher MBE, and Bethany Shriever MBE — shown in action within their respective sport, visually establishing their athletic identity before the narrative transitions to a shared Old El Paso meal. The structural choice is deliberate: it earns the emotional beat of togetherness by first grounding each athlete in individual excellence, making the collective table scene feel like a genuine culmination rather than a staged product placement.
Tom Dean MBE functions as the creative anchor. Described in campaign materials as the chef of the Home Team meal, Dean's dual role — elite swimmer and convivial host — reinforces the campaign's core proposition that the same qualities that define great athletic teamwork define a great shared meal. As Dean stated, as reported by Little Black Book: 'Old El Paso is the perfect partner for me and the Home Team Heroes as it symbolizes the essence of coming together, just like when we're competing, where teamwork is paramount.' That quote captures the creative brief in a single sentence and validates the tonal register of the film.
The on-pack creative extends the film's logic into the retail environment. Individual packs feature each athlete alongside their personal flavour tip, transforming a functional promotional mechanic into a piece of character-driven storytelling that differentiates the pack design within a competitive fixture. Production credits for the 'Make Some Noise for your Home Team' campaign beyond the agency attribution to M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment are not publicly documented in available sources. The campaign's visual language, as observed across social and digital channels referenced by Newdigitalage Co and lbbonline.com, prioritises warmth and energy in equal measure — a palette that connects the vibrancy of Olympic competition with the comfort of a home-cooked meal.
No verified third-party performance data for the 'Make Some Noise for your Home Team' campaign — including reach, engagement rates, sales uplift, or brand tracking shifts — is publicly available at the time of publication. Assessment therefore rests on structural and strategic indicators drawn from the campaign's documented architecture.
The campaign's multi-channel deployment across digital, social, radio, PR, shopper marketing, and on-pack promotion in the United Kingdom represents a fully integrated activation rather than a media-channel experiment, as documented by mediapost.com and talkingretail.com. The on-pack competition mechanic, offering VIP Paris 2024 Olympic Games tickets, provides a direct consumer response layer that generates measurable retail data for Old El Paso and General Mills, even if those figures remain proprietary. The athlete roster — four decorated Olympians holding MBE honours or Olympic medals across four distinct sports — gives the campaign broad demographic reach across the UK market, spanning the sport-specific fan bases of swimming, weightlifting, diving, and BMX racing simultaneously.
The campaign's structural weakness, and the primary factor tempering its Clapboard Score, is the relative genericness of the 'team sport' metaphor when applied to food. The connection between athletic teamwork and family mealtimes is intuitive but not surprising, which limits the campaign's capacity to generate the kind of cultural conversation that the strongest sports-sponsorship activations produce. The Clapboard Score for 'Make Some Noise for your Home Team' is 63 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that executes its brief competently and with genuine creative warmth, but that does not push the Old El Paso brand into genuinely new creative territory.
'Make Some Noise for your Home Team' is a multi-million pound Old El Paso campaign launched in the United Kingdom in April 2024. Created by M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, it appointed four Team GB Olympic athletes as Home Team Heroes and connected shared mealtimes with national support for Team GB ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Old El Paso named four Team GB athletes as Home Team Heroes. They are double Olympic swimming champion Tom Dean MBE, Olympic silver-medal-winning weightlifter Emily Campbell, Olympic diving champion and three-time medallist Jack Laugher MBE, and Olympic BMX racing champion Bethany Shriever MBE. Each athlete appeared on individual Old El Paso promotional retail packs.
M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment led the 'Make Some Noise for your Home Team' campaign. The agency operates as a specialist passions agency and managed the full campaign, which ran across digital, social, radio, PR, shopper marketing, and on-pack promotional channels in the United Kingdom from April 2024.
Old El Paso offered consumers the chance to win VIP tickets to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The promotion was accessible via specially marked Old El Paso retail packs available in-store from April 2024 across the brand's UK portfolio, with each pack also featuring a personal meal tip from one of the four Home Team Heroes.
The Clapboard Score for 'Make Some Noise for your Home Team' is 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong integrated execution and a credible athlete roster across the UK market, tempered by a team-sport metaphor that, while intuitive, does not push the Old El Paso brand into distinctly new creative territory.
Tom Dean MBE served as the creative anchor of the campaign's 30-second launch film, playing the role of chef and host who brings the Home Team together for an Old El Paso meal. Dean also stated that Old El Paso symbolises the essence of coming together, directly echoing the campaign's core strategic proposition about teamwork and shared mealtimes.
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