How AMV Turned Currys Biggest Vulnerability Into £500m

There are plenty of – arguably too many - highly prized advertising awards that claim to recognise great work. But if it’s business results you’re interested in, then the IPA Effectiveness Awards are amongst the most coveted accolades in the industry. Because here the judges demand robust proof that the work actually worked.

Winning the Grand Prix, then, is a significant and meaningful coup for both client and agency. And this year that honour goes to AMV, Spark Foundry, and Currys for The Superpower In-store. It tells the story of how a retailer, apparently on the wrong side of the ecommerce revolution, turned one of its greatest perceived vulnerabilities into a source of growth.

The numbers alone make quite a case. Over two years, the strategy behind Currys’ Beyond Techspectations platform generated £500m in incremental revenue, increased market share by 1.1 percentage points and delivered a 44 per cent increase in long-term ROI. Most importantly, it helped return the business to sustained growth and Currys to its position as the UK’s most-preferred technology retailer.

It's the thinking that sits behind those numbers that really sets the Currys work apart; AMV and Spark Foundry didn't try to turn Currys into Amazon, they recognised that its best chance of competing with ecommerce was to make much more of something it already had – thousands of people who really knew their stuff.

Finding the advantage in the problem

Back in 2023, the prospects for a large bricks-and-mortar electrical retailer looked complicated.

Technology shopping had moved decisively online. Currys reported that 45 per cent of its UK and Ireland business was online in 2022/23, compared with 32 per cent before the pandemic. UK&I like-for-like sales had fallen 7 per cent that year amid inflation, rising interest rates, and a normalisation of the pandemic-era technology boom. Currys was still the UK's leading technology retailer, but it was also the last major specialist standing with a substantial physical store estate.

That could easily have been regarded as an expensive hangover from an earlier age of retail.

Instead, AMV and Spark Foundry's analysis identified what the agencies called a "crisis of unassisted selling". People might have been increasingly comfortable buying technology online, but the products they were buying weren't necessarily getting any simpler. Choosing a television, laptop, or washing machine can mean working through specifications, compatibility, connectivity, sustainability, warranties, and an often bewildering range of prices. The internet provides plenty of information. What it doesn't always provide is someone who can tell you which bit of that information actually matters.

Currys already had thousands of those people. And while online shopping was growing, Currys' own figures suggested the store was far from obsolete: two-thirds of technology customers said they preferred shopping using stores.

So the opportunity wasn't to apologise for having a physical retail estate, but to make more of the expertise sitting inside it.

Enter the tech experts

Beyond Techspectations launched in August 2023 with creative from AMV and media strategy from Spark Foundry. At its heart was a straightforward promise: Currys colleagues know a great deal about technology and will go to extraordinary lengths to help customers. AMV's creative leap was to make those lengths properly extraordinary.

Currys "colleagues" started appearing in airport luggage trays, vats of baked beans, and cow costumes, dispensing technology advice to understandably bemused customers.

Later iterations became stranger still. Colleagues grew enormous beards to demonstrate the depths of their tech wisdom. Others ate instruction manuals to absorb their contents.

The expertise was genuine. The way AMV chose to demonstrate it was knowingly ridiculous.

As AMV BBDO's then chief creative officers Nicholas Hulley and Nadja Lossgott said when the campaign launched, it required a "brave, confident client" to showcase Currys' expertise through stylised comedy. More importantly, the idea gave the agency somewhere to keep going.

When Currys wanted to communicate the value customers could receive for trading in old technology, shoppers were literally knocked off their feet by the news, landing in ball pools conveniently placed by Currys colleagues. Then came Sigh of Relief, Currys' Channel 4 Diversity in Advertising Award-winning campaign, which used the same comic world to tackle the difficulties people with disabilities can experience when shopping for technology.

AMV worked with Open Inclusion, RNIB and RNID, while the film incorporated a British Sign Language interpreter and audio describer into the creative itself. Once again Currys colleagues were at the centre of the action, helping customers discover accessible features before the shoppers released enormous, gale-force sighs of relief.

It was a good demonstration of just how far Beyond Techspectations could stretch. The subject matter had changed significantly, but Currys hadn't suddenly started behaving like a different brand.

Three years after its launch, AMV is still finding new places to take it. Most recently the agency has used the familiar "dad energy" trope to talk about energy efficiency, with Currys colleagues helping customers understand how technology can reduce waste around the home.

More than an advertising campaign

The IPA judges were interested in more than the creative, however.

Behind Beyond Techspectations, AMV, and Spark Foundry also helped Currys rethink its marketing approach, moving the business away from short-term, supplier-led planning cycles towards longer-term return on investment.

That broader impact particularly impressed Suzanne Quinn, chair of judges for the IPA Effectiveness Awards and UK customer director at Tesco.

“What particularly impressed the judges about the Grand Prix winner was that it went far beyond advertising alone,” she says. “It demonstrated how marketing can act as a real catalyst for business-wide transformation, earning a seat at the top table and helping drive meaningful change across an organisation.

“What I especially admire about this work is the way it put Currys’ colleagues at the heart of the growth story, turning their expertise into a genuine competitive advantage.”

Charlie Ebdy, convenor of judges for the IPA Effectiveness Awards and chief strategy officer UK at Omnicom Media, describes Currys' renaissance as a rejoinder to an industry “sometimes at pains to convince itself of its own ineffectiveness”. Beyond Techspectations, he says, is “a singular platform, built on a simple difference, executed with coherence, distinctiveness, and wit in a multitude of media, relentlessly optimised”.

The performance of the wider business since the campaign launched provides some useful context. Currys reported UK&I market share of 16.9 per cent for 2024/25, up 50 basis points on the previous year. By 2025/26, UK&I like-for-like revenue was up 3 per cent and Currys said it had gained another 60 basis points of market share despite the overall market declining by 1.3 per cent. Group adjusted profit before tax rose 18 per cent to £191m.

And the physical stores that once appeared to leave Currys particularly exposed to ecommerce remain very much part of the plan. Currys now describes its omnichannel model as a competitive advantage; omnichannel sales reached 33 per cent of UK&I revenue in 2025/26, up three percentage points in two years, while the retailer has continued investing in technology designed to give store colleagues more time with customers.

In September, Currys reported UK&I like-for-like revenue growth of 6 per cent for the first 17 weeks of its new financial year, with growth both in stores and online and market-share gains across all major categories.

The IPA Effectiveness Awards have always set a deliberately high bar, with entries scrutinised by technical, industry and client judging panels to establish the commercial payback of marketing. This Grand Prix a useful reminder of what can happen when a simple strategic thought is given enough time, investment and creative consistency to work.