Mercedes Benz Vans wanted to reposition themselves as the go-to brand for SMB owners looking to make the move to electric, and drive links to their online showroom.
We knew their rivals owned the traditional sole trader audience, so we took a different approach, positioning MBV as the brand for the new face of modern van drivers. 25 years after the ‘white van man’ term was coined, our research showed van drivers no longer fitted that stereotype, with almost half being women who did yoga and read The Times. It spawned a new trend - Green Van Woman.
We put people in the middle by finding a case study small business owner who could bring our research to life in press, generating 46 pieces of top tier coverage including The Times, the Sun, The i, Daily Star, 37 that included link backs to the MBV website, online coverage with an average domain authority score of 7 and 128 earned mentions for Mercedes-Benz Vans.
MERCEDES BENZ - GREEN VAN WOMAN
As part of their rebrand, Sage wanted to engage their teams in the process, establish redefined values and champion their talent.
We created a campaign that began by putting employees into readiness mode, letting them know that the customer launch was coming soon and building excitement.
With awareness building, we asked employees to get involved, recruiting a community of global contributors to share stories and become content creators. Our Sage Storytellers became our on-the-ground heroes, supporting the rebrand campaign, launch, and beyond.
We gave them a year-long calendar of Sage Storyteller missions designed to excite, delight, inform and educate, using all the key Sage comms channels, from video to blog posts. We included filmed podcasts and remotely shot films, where the Storytellers interviewed teams behind the new brand, promoting the new values with a grounded view of why they’re so important to the business and its culture.
The campaign galvanised the global audience around the rebrand launch and having consciously recruited across all regions, gave a local view of the global change, making teams feel more connected and involved in the wider change and their global Day 1 event.
SAGE - BRAND REFRESH LAUNCH
Regularly polling as Britain’s “Most Trusted Person” – money saving expert Martin Lewis trusts us to handle his PR, working across some of his biggest consumer campaigns and landing profile pieces in the most credible media, from The Sunday Times to Desert Island Discs.
He asked us to devise an aggressive PR campaign to force the government to create new legislation cracking down on scam ads. As part of a wide-ranging publicity drive, we designed our own advert made up of scam ads and paraded it in front of lawmakers in Parliament Square. To support the campaign we secured 12 high profile figures including Richard Branson, Deborah Meaden and Robbie Williams to join the fight.
MARTIN LEWIS
What started as a simple call for employees to return to the office as part of an official hybrid working model became a global campaign. While social media was flooded with brands going viral for getting their back-to-the-office message all wrong, our #WFHere campaign nailed it. We combined digital, print and environmental dressing that became a celebration of Amazon’s great working spaces and the benefits of being together.
This UK campaign performed so well it was used globally and adopted as the core theme to the first in-person All Hands event of the year, cementing Amazon’s hybrid working approach.
AMAZON - RETURN TO THE OFFICE
BT wanted to showcase Care Home Companions; a scheme set up to pair care-home residents with call-centre staff for weekly calls to tackle loneliness. They also wanted to promote their Digital Skills campaign to encourage older people to learn new skills to make the most of life online.
Knowing our target audience were the over 70s, we partnered with someone we knew they’d engage with - 1966 World Cup legend, Sir Geoff Hurst - to create a powerful film and social assets.
We surprised care home resident, Bill Oliphant, and his BT call centre companion Ricky and filmed a trip to Bill’s beloved Newcastle United ground, where they met Sir Geoff to tour the stadium and recreate the famous line from his iconic World Cup final commentary. Sir Geoff also taught Bill how to make his first video call back to his care home, demonstrating how digital skills can help older people stay in touch with family and friends.
Our heart-warming film and media day, with Sir Geoff talking authentically about his own online challenges and the benefits of keeping it touch using technology, helped us land over 50 pieces of the highest quality coverage.
BT - CAREHOME COMPANIONS
The BBC asked us to create a comms programme that integrated their refreshed values with their external ‘Our BBC’ comms platform, to unite their teams and inspire their cultural ambitions.
Some of our most beloved characters, moments and memories have been given to us by the BBC. Using their own legendary characters and most famous one liner’s we engaged colleagues in a truly emotive way.
We also created a refreshed Values guide and challenged ourselves to land messages in different places and spaces around their environments, helping them connect with their values in different ways that got them thinking and talking about what they really mean, day in, day out.
THE BBC - VALUES REFRESH
Plusnet wanted a new approach to its comms, to support a more aggressive press office direction that made the most of its straight-talking position as a value communications provider.
Our strategy was to build an emotional connection with the audience by partnering with relatable people including Coronation Street’s Antony Cotton and Sky Sports pundit, Chris Kamara, while using a mix of humour and informational personal finance stories for a powerful media relations push.
Within our first 12 months of working with Plusnet we increased the brand’s media value by 48% year-on-year.
Plusnet claimed the top spot in YouGov’s Biggest Brand Movers in the UK, making improvements in eight YouGov BrandIndex metrics out of the 13 that are considered.
Plusnet measured rises in YouGov’s four key metrics; Awareness, Ad Awareness, Word Of Mouth Exposure and Buzz, as well as making gains in the brand health metrics - Impression, Reputation and Recommend and the purchase funnel metric Consideration.
11 case studies helped deliver a further 63 pieces of top tier national press coverage.
PLUSNET - WITH ANTONY COTTON (AND HIS MUM)
Like most employers, BT is invested in all aspects of their teams’ wellbeing, with mental health a key focus.
Winter is often a tough period for mental wellbeing, so the BT team asked us to help them engage teams, share practical info and help teams connect more during the colder months, post-Christmas.
We built a campaign that put a fun spin on the classic New Year fitness drive to brush aside the pressure and get everyone moving more.
Our ‘Let’s Talk About’ video and podcast series covered a range of health and wellbeing topics. Watched, liked and commented on by over 14,000 employees, it was hosted by BT colleagues and featured interviews with expert guests, offering in depth advice on everything from gut health to anxiety and financial literacy.
The series was supported by a navigable workbook, filled with tips and resources for a healthy festive period, before kicking off the year with ‘The Big Stretch’ global exercise challenge.
The Workplace-led campaign grabbed colleagues’ attention with a series of fun gifs and memes and calls to action to challenge themselves in support of BT’s charity partners. We also created a Blue Monday Spotify playlist to help everyone get through the year’s (alleged) gloomiest day.
BT - WINTER WELLBEING
As EE prepared to be the first UK telco to go to market with 5G, they were adamant their employees would be integral to launch from the outset.
Our ‘All About The Gs’ campaign delivered a relentless approach to messaging consistency tied with localisation for launch cities and a full ‘5 Days of 5G’ launch week of activities. We also created a ground-breaking internal influencer programme, recruiting 25 ‘5G Makers’ to become pro-level content creators. They fanned out across the business to tell the story of 5G; by colleagues, for colleagues.
By reimagining the role employees can play in a campaign, we created a brand-new process, programme and voice in the business. We gave a genuine skills opportunity to colleagues who took part and delivered a masterclass in peer-to-peer communications that won us the CorpComms ‘Best Employee Engagement Programme’ Award, where the judges said our campaign…
“…re-defined employee engagement.”
We thought so too..
EE - LAUNCHING 5G ON THE INSIDE
Our work for the Orange global sponsorship team has included a ‘Games of Change’ campaign that encouraged football fans in Africa to collect and exchange discarded plastic for much-needed grassroots kit, much of which was made from recycled plastic itself; everything from boots and shirts, to nets and pitches. We also created a ‘Future of Sponsorship’ guide that helped teams adapt their approach to sponsorship properties and events during the Covid-19 pandemic, and more importantly, start looking at things from a new perspective for a post-lockdown future.
ORANGE - SPONSORSHIP STRATEGY
Our award-winning campaigns and gold-standard media relations propelled Internet Matters to become the most recognised internet safety organisation in the UK, second only to the NSPCC. Appearing regularly across the BBC, ITV and Sky News, our work also gets them featured in every national newspaper and major consumer publication, averaging five pieces of coverage a day over the last five years.
INTERNET MATTERS
Through strategic, integrated PR and media campaigns, we helped Music for Dementia drive a national movement for people living with dementia to have access to music as part of their care. Rallying the music industry and care sector by hiring BBC Radio 6 Music DJ, Lauren Laverne, as a pro-bono campaign ambassador, we successfully engaged the 1 in 4 people in the UK who are affected by dementia in some way – whether it’s themselves or a loved one. Features on BBC TV flagships The One Show and BBC Breakfast even resulted in a single live-on-air donation of £500,000 – for the Paul and Nick Harvey Fund – which is being used to help bring music to people living with dementia across the UK.
MUSIC FOR DEMENTIA
When Thames Water asked us to review and evolve their brand identity system, we engaged teams across the business to understand pain-points with their existing assets and rules. The result was a much-improved system with some new, fresh elements, streamlining of their existing elements and much clearer guidance across the board with a detailed new brand book. We also created a brand film to support their refreshed brand purpose and mission.
THAMES WATER - BRAND ID REFRESH
During the first Covid lockdown, we helped HelpMyStreet.org launch their national help service. HelpMyStreet’s free online hub matches vulnerable members of the community with local volunteers who have been ID-checked. Safe, trusted, helping hands, organised and verified to make looking after each other as simple as it can be. Our segmented campaign encouraged those needing help to register, while recruiting Helpers and Street Champions and promoting the platform tools to broader community volunteer groups.