Some highlights
Sometimes it’s nice to share the fruits of your labour. Here are just a select few pieces of work that I’ve been involved in over the years.
Of course, there’s a bias to shiny videos & images mainly because they’re easiest to share. It’s harder to show the work that’s gone into the strategic or operational side of things, but I’m always happy to talk through those in more detail myself.
Volkswagen
The best work I did on the VW account was for the ‘Value’ campaign. Our aim was to justify the VW price premium versus cheaper competitors, whilst still showing that our cars were surprisingly affordable. The campaigns were hugely successful at increasing public perceptions of value for money, and helped keep VW near the top of the mass-market marques.
This Stephen Hawking radio ad is a personal fave from that time — when Prof. Hawking had a wobble as to whether he should do the ad, I wrote him a personal email that convinced him to go ahead with it. Bizarrely, it’s also one of the most complained-about adverts of all time. (People didn’t think it was really his voice. It was. I promise.)
Audi
I worked on Audi from my first day at BBH to my last, a total of four years. In that time, I was a key part of a close-knit team that produced some of the best and most commercially effective work for the brand in recent history. I was the Senior Account Director, overseeing and leading the work that came out of the brand side of the business. That included product launches (sometimes at global scale) for cars like the Q7, R8, and TT, and a growing focus on brand-building mass-awareness activity.
In 2015 we helped convince Audi to make a strategic shift from chasing volume targets to prioritising higher margin sales. This had a simple but important effect on our approach to communications; hero the profit-makers (mainly Sport models, high-end SUVs, and in-car tech) in ads that drive fame for the brand, and then use conversion channels to turn that increased demand into sales.
The output of this was some of the most famous work done for Audi in a long time - the likes of Spin, Department Store, and Clowns, to name just three - and a truly huge commercial impact, estimated at £1.6bn of directly attributable sales. As well as numerous creative awards, this won Audi the coveted IPA Long Term Effectiveness Grand Prix award, which was a career highlight. You can read the Executive Summary of the case study below.
In my last 18 months at BBH I ran five Google projects, three of which we won in pitches I led. By far the largest was the UK launch of Pixel 2 with a truly enormous campaign that spanned every conceivable channel. The Digital Outdoor element was particularly complex, with media placements served in a hyper-contextual way via a real-time decision tree.
What the hell does that mean? Well, it meant automatically showing an ad for long battery life at train stations when we knew there were delays. It meant showing ads for one feature during the day, and switching to promote the low-light camera after nightfall. It meant more than 2,400 permutations, across 104 formats, in 405 locations nationally.
The outdoor plan also included a number of ‘media firsts’, such as buses that serve specific messaging based on the time of day and where they are on their route — for example displaying “Can I take as many dinosaur pics as I want? The Google Pixel 2 with unlimited storage” when outside the National History Museum. You can watch a short case study of how it worked below.
The Black Sheep Programme
During my final year at BBH I became jointly responsible for recruitment for the Account Management department. On top of that, I developed, obtained funding for, and ran The Black Sheep Programme – an entry-level recruitment & training initiative with the aim of getting a more diverse group of talent into the industry. To help counteract unconscious biases, we removed all personal information from applications (even names), and made sure each of the 400+ applications was double-marked. I’m proud to have made some effort to diversify the talent pool in the industry, and it was rewarding to personally help train them up. This is the film we used to promote the programme.
Entrepreneur First
I joined EF as the most senior marketing person in the company, reporting directly into the founders and responsible for our output across all six sites; London, Paris, Berlin, Singapore, Bangalore and Toronto. I was responsible for a broad marketing mix that ranged from brand strategy to PR to SEO. One of the most impactful and most wide-reaching projects I ran was a full rebrand of the company.
It was an in-depth exploration of where the brand had come from, its aims for the future, and how we could set it up for success. Working with select partners, I led everything from long-term strategy to visual identity; a new website to new document templates; an alumni reveal to shiny new swag. I had to get buy-in from across the organisation with a global roadshow, then roll out internationally in a synchronised fashion.
I also modernised how we used social media. I prioritised the paid distribution of few, high-level pieces of film (like this one) and reused lots of excellent pre-existing content that barely anyone had seen further down the funnel, where it was more relevant. And through our content and social channels we began to focus on telling the human stories of our founders — what made them so impressive, and how they started their journeys. To celebrate the launch of our $115m Global Fund, which would allow us to invest in 2,000+ talented individuals over three years, we told the incredible backstories of founders from each of our locations, like Lebanese biologist Joanne, and banker-turned-CEO Rohit.
PR also became a huge part of what we did at EF. I devised an international PR strategy working with partner agencies across all six of our territories, which proved very successful. It got us 120+ pieces of coverage in our first year, including the Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, WIRED, the Guardian, Fast Company, the FT, TechCrunch, etc, as well as high-quality coverage across the top dailies in France, Hong Kong, India and Singapore — and even repeated interviews on French breakfast TV news. Importantly, it didn’t just grow our awareness; PR became the second highest driver of organic applications to the programme.