Creative Activations
Coca-Cola
The Red Balloon Project
Our brief from Coca-Cola was to ‘bring out the Santa’ in consumers and encourage them to "Share happiness" with a stranger.
We placed an ordinary looking vending machine in a Romanian town square, offering a unique choice: A free Coke for you or #sharethegood.
Every time someone chose #sharethegood their kindness was rewarded with a surprise. A red balloon flew from the top of the machine, carrying a gift that would make someone else happy.
In 48 hours, over 1,300 people interacted with the machine. 80% actively chose to give rather than receive, sharing over 1,000 random acts of kindness. The experiment was posted on YouTube and surpassed every expectation, generating conversations on blogs and social media in over 50 countries. Over 800,000 people actively engaged with the activity, with more than 5.3million views on youtube. Coca-Cola said it was "the best content delivered across the CSE market that year”.
eBay
Celebrating DIY spirit at Goodwood Festival of Speed
This live event activation for eBay became the ultimate walk-in, 3D version of their website, targeting the brand’s huge community of car tinkerers and enthusiasts.
Because there’s an obvious joy to sourcing car parts and doing it yourself, we saw an opportunity to bring this ‘DIY Spirit’ to life, creating a live version of eBay that visitors could jump inside. This powerful insight allowed us to develop content that fused experience and entertainment to flex personal empowerment through DIY.
Working closely with eBay and their agency, Collaborate Global, we created a multi-functional space that turned brand education into entertainment, transforming perceptions of eBay from transactional to ‘satisfactional’.
Bursting with content to bring care and repair within everyone’s reach, the eBay stand offered something for everyone, with big talent hosting live talks, live DIY demonstrations and expert help and advice for all levels of experience – even a play area for those not-so-enthusiastic family members.
Our real-life realisation of the eBay website brought DIY satisfaction to life in a sustainable petrolhead heaven, revved to the max with auto influencers, curated content, panel talks, guidance and help, showcasing eBay’s unrivalled parts inventory with its own, on-brand classic car parts museum.
Impact
81,000 total visitors, with 20,500 engaged guests
21,000 engaged fans
9 minutes average dwell time
One of the busiest debuts ever recorded at the world’s largest car culture event
Average dwell time of 10m – averaging 2x more than the event’s own standard
8,040 (10%) total guests returning to stand on the next calendar day
NSPCC
Christmas Thank You Mailer
Die cut delight for NSPCC regular donors.
NSPCC
Mobilising donors to lobby government
I stand for Children Campaign
With a rallying cry of "I Stand for Children", we invited NSPCC supporters to petition their local parliamentary candidates to sign our pledge and fight for the rights of children at the highest level. Voters were encouraged across Facebook, Twitter, etc., as well as through email, and DM, to visit the website. Here, they could directly contact their local election candidates and request their pledge to support this campaign. email to donors:
Landing page:
Social media amplification:
Guinness
Hijacking the Rugby World Cup
Pitch win
At Geometry Global, I ran the successful creative pitch for Guinness, answering a brief to hijack the Rugby World Cup.
A well-poured Guinness is a storm in a pint glass. And, to those gathering in bars before a big match, there’s always a feeling of a storm about to break. With this focus on the huge sense of anticipation before a big international match, and the moments when friends gather in bars to order their first pint, I created the campaign theme "Greet the Gathering Storm".
Following the pitch win, Geometry was appointed lead integrated agency across all Diageo brands. This win represented a conflict with existing clients at Geometry and I went across to JWT to build a new creative department within our new conflict agency there.
This mood film was a key part of the pitch, focusing on the powerful sense of anticipation before a big international fixture and connecting that with the storm that gathers in a pint glass as a Guinness is poured.
In-bar activation campaign: “The Guinness Lineout”
At the centre of our subsequent live work was "The Guinness Lineout", a themed serve tray that encouraged groups to go all in with Guinness for their round.
Over a million units were produced, converting countless rugby fans to Guinness in that crucial last metre to the bar, as drinkers chose their pints before kick-off. By printing different humorous rugby stereotypes, both on pint glasses and on The Guinness Lineout unit, the piece represented an invitation for groups to share a moment of camaraderie as they assigned each other different roles in their own 'team'.
Personalised branded pint glasses:
“Fly Half: Physically timid. Boldly verbal.”
“Coach: Wise words. Tall tales. Murky past.“
“Lock: Tall, strong powerhouse. Devoid of conscious thought.”
Social amplification: “Put your team together”
Off-trade free glass promotion
The History Channel creates thought-provoking TV, an alternative to the norm. So we developed an outdoor campaign to engage thinking audiences.
We looked for ironies, of instances of history repeating itself, juxtaposing historical images against various quotations from the past, often from different points in time from those shown in the pictures.
Using two simple elements together like this in combination created a powerful way to succinctly echo various human truths - the church Vs State, always having to fight for your beliefs, the eternal ignorance of music execs...
The History Channel
Outdoor campaign
Smirnoff Vodka
Taking creative nightlife direct to its audience
Experiential Brand Development
Smirnoff felt that the brand had become cold, distant and out of touch with bar-goers. So they wanted to bypass traditional marketing routes and instead create direct consumer experiences that would bring the Smirnoff experience to life.Leading RPM’s winning pitch for the business, I developed an experiential strategy that would reconnect the brand with its natural audience.
We began with the premise that a typical night out simply wasn’t good enough. We said that people should be able to ask for more from a night out than just a DJ (they're only playing records after all).We wrote a manifesto calling for “Original Nights” and the return of fringe entertainment back into the mainstream. Creating “The Electric Cabaret”, we produced a strategy and toolkit of left-field activities and entertainments, from street theatre, to burlesque, to putting on Silent Disco gigs featuring big name acts.At smaller scale activations, such as student nights drink purchases were rewarded with a free item from a dressing up box (moustache, boa etc).As well as creating the brand platform and concept for Smirnoff Experiential activity, we also developed the social media campaign to drive awareness.In year one, we'd created The Electric Cabaret. In year two, we launched 'Original Nights', challenging consumers to co-create events with support from the Smirnoff brand. £5,000 ‘Creative Grants’ were offered to people with the best ideas for a special night, democratizing and empowering the target market to fully embrace opportunities on their terms. With this grass roots, indie approach, the campaign grew legs of its own, with more and more performing artists keen to get involved.One example of this process was the unforgettable Slumberfest – Smirnoff’s take on the classic slumber party, taken to new levels of hedonism.With Original Nights, Smirnoff built a brand that connected with their core audience and delivered so much more than would have been possible through traditional advertising techniques. 
Slumberfest
Silent gig
Sky
Immersive experiential theatre event
Lights. Camera. Immersion.
Why watch a film, when you can step inside it? I supported Collaborate Global in creating film concepts and scripts for a ‘secret cinema’ style activation for Sky Cinema, in an immersive theatre experience that blurred the boundaries between performer and audience.
Wrapping guests within five performance stages, visitors were plunged into an unforgettable retro filmset experience, immersed within a ‘live’ filming of an authentic 1960s sci fi space adventure, Moon Fever.
INside this lifelike 'on-set' atmosphere, visitors became extras, mingling with actors as participants of a show within a show, as they joined scenes being acted out before a retro camera, lighting and sound crew. Disco dance scenes, inflatable monsters, and a musical cast of colourful aliens and astronauts captivated the audience, achieving an engagement rate of 95%.
Philips
Sonicare & Airfloss
Vibrating with up to 62,000 brush strokes per minute, Sonicare toothbrushes deliver a powerful buzz unlike any other on the market. Our campaign focused on the “Buzz effect” as a tangible point of difference, underscoring this with real consumers’ social media ‘buzz’ as a further reason to believe.
Sonicare product comms for online and in dental surgeries:
With its powerful airblast technology, the Philips Airfloss offers a much easier way to clean between teeth than traditional floss or inter-dental brushes. We summarised this simplicity as a ‘one-touch clean’, dramatising the product’s effectiveness using typographic breaks.
Philips Airfloss
Boots
No.7 Laboratories
Strapline development
When Boots launched their No.7 range of beauty and skincare products across Europe, they needed a compelling strapline and attitude for the brand that expressed their unique point of difference in the beauty world. Given the long scientific heritage of the brand’s famous Nottingham laboratories, “Pure Chemistry” landed the job neatly.
In contrast to their competitors, Bilbo's Motorhome conversions offer useful, hard-wearing recreational vehicle spec for 'real outdoors people. Our insight was that some caravanners are ‘doers’ and some are sitters. We targeted 'The doers'; the ones who love life, who find a welly full of water hilarious rather than annoying.
So we came up with the campaign idea of "Doers Wanted", promising the quality and performance of Bilbo's motorhomes to deliver the capabilities that appeal to the ‘doing’ mindset.
