For the stories worth telling.

Facebook Creative X - How brand uncertainty undermines the work

Before it became Meta, I had the genuine pleasure of working at Facebook for 6 months in 2019 on a UK version of their global More Together campaign. As part of a diverse team of talented people, I helped create an ambitious and creative series of videos about genuine Facebook groups that captured one of Facebook's core strengths: the chance to meet new people who share a love for the things you love.

It was an awesome campaign featuring some beautiful shots and touching moments that took us from Battle Rapping in an abandoned Manchester warehouse to diving into freezing water on a winter's morning in the Lake District. We met dozens of amazing, passionate people and worked through Christmas to edit, tweak and score dozens of pieces of social content.

And then, after 6 months of effort, everything got chucked in the bin. Why? Because focus groups were watching Facebook's TV ads and not realising they were for Facebook. Brand Linkage was off the bottom of the charts and, unsurprisingly, making the logo so big it filled the screen didn't fix the problem.

Like I said, I loved working at Facebook. It was one of the nicest working environments I've ever experienced. But it doesn't matter what you or your employees think you stand for - it matters what your customers think you stand for. Branding doesn't work if it's not authentic and you can't rely on a big logo for brand awareness.

Save The Children - The Most Shocking Second a Day

4 million children were suffering loss, displacement and deprivation after three years of brutal civil war in Syria; and yet the world was ignoring them. Save The Children wanted to change that with a social-first, earned media campaign that would change the world.

With no budget to speak of, the only solution was to create a charity video like none that had come before it, and tell a story of Syrian refugees that made their plight impossible to ignore. The greatest tragedy of this piece of work, and its sequel below, is that it is more relevant today than ever, which is why it continues to go viral and hit the Reddit front page more than a decade after its release.

Sainsbury's - The Bude Christmas Tunnel

4 million children were suffering loss, displacement and deprivation after three years of brutal civil war in Syria; and yet the world was ignoring them. Save The Children wanted to change that with a social-first, earned media campaign that would change the world.

Everything that made those first ads special is diluted as the herd moves in, which makes original thinking and outside-the-box creativity all the more important.

Greenpeace - LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome!

There's a common psychological tactic employed by less ethical businesses. It involves donating to good causes, sponsoring the arts and partnering with brands in good ethical standing in order to distract people from the fairly heinous stuff the business gets up to behind the scenes.

Shell is one such business, and one of its critical pieces of PR activity was a partnership with much-loved toy brand LEGO. Greenpeace asked us to create a film to spearhead a campaign to break up this partnership and shine a harsh, unforgiving light on Shell's plans to drill for oil in the fragile Arctic.

Our film of LEGO figures, set to a haunting, melancholy parody of The LEGO Movie theme tune, inspired so much public support that LEGO was forced to dump Shell as a marketing partner, ending their 50-year-long, £65m deal. Thus drowning the oil company’s marketing objectives in an irresistible tide of views, shares and press coverage.

Industry awards include a much-coveted D&AD White Pencil, a Webby, a Lovie, 2 Cannes Lions, a DADI Chairman's award and several others.

Google Arts & Culture - The History Of Us

Great art describes what it means to be human. And that hasn't changed in thousands of years, despite the increasing pace of technological change. The five museums and galleries that make up Museum Island in Berlin have a plethora of artistic and cultural riches, but in an increasingly digital world, how do you connect with a whole generation of people who get most of their culture through their phone?

Our core insight was that the problems, jokes and trends sweeping through Instagram and Twitter (as it was then) are nothing new. They're just new expressions of very old human behaviours: love, friendship, work, boasting, nostalgia... the list could have been endless.

So we took the visual language of social media and applied it to thousand-year-old works of art. And it fit perfectly.

NSPCC Childline - #ListenToYourSelfie

Teens are increasingly worried about online sexual abuse, with ChildLine seeing a troubling 24% rise in relevant counselling sessions in the last year alone. But it's a difficult subject to talk about online, let alone create something viral that kids will share.

So we created the #ListenToYourSelfie campaign that included two films: The Party, aimed at girls to warn them of the dangers of peer pressure, especially from older men, and The Game, aimed at boys just getting to grips with their sexuality and the dangers they can face online.

The campaign changed ChildLine’s tone of voice, allowed them speak to an older youth audience and showed teens there is place to turn in the face of all sorts of issues (from sex, to bullying, to depression).

“The ChildLine videos are more helpful than other campaigns… they show actual situations, real people and what those situations look like.”

To accompany the hero content we created range of tailored campaign assets that sat across digital platform, from Facebook and YouTube to Instagram and Snapchat. For Instagram, we created images, voice boxes, messenger style gifs and teaser videos that gave ChildLine’s Instagram following a huge boost of over 100% in just two weeks. And our Snapchat vertical video teasers and story exceeded the Snapchat swipe up rate (benchmark 5%) with a rate of 29%.

In addition, the campaign received more than 100 media hits including from The Times, The Guardian and Sky News. Most importantly, the ChildLine website saw a 400% uplift in traffic and three times as many new visitors.

A focus group of boys and girls aged 11-14 had a hugely positive response to both videos. They found the videos easy to understand, engaging and relatable. Importantly, it would make them think twice about how they would act if faced with either situation.

National Autistic Society - Too Much Information

More than 99% of people have heard of autism, but very few actually understand it. The National Autistic Society wanted to raise awareness, challenge public attitudes and change behaviour. We created “Too Much Information” a 360 multi channel campaign to do just that.

Launching with ‘Can you make it to the end?’ an emotionally powerful video which showed, through the eyes of an autistic child, what it’s like to deal with sensory overload, the film earned headlines and coverage everywhere from the Daily Mail and Unilad to Mumsnet – even meriting a mention at Prime Minister’s Question Time.

Most importantly, though, the NAS achieved 50% of their yearly sign-up target in just 10 days. The film was so well received, a cinematic cut was played across the UK in Empire and Odeon cinemas without a penny of media spend.

Partnering with The Guardian, we reached a huge audience beyond YouTube and Facebook, with the TMI Guardian hub receiving so much traffic that it earned its way onto The Guardian’s homepage, the first paid-for content hub ever to do so. The campaign was also supported by a 360 degree autism film that was used in schools and taken on an experiential tour of the country using Samsung Gear VR headsets.

Guide Dogs UK - A Test of Blind Ambition

Charity Blind Children approached us with a brief to create empathy for blind children and stop people writing them off as students and future employment prospects. The brief was very open-ended and the budget super low, but something about it caught my imagination.

Libby Clegg had just won gold in the Paralympics 100m, and even though she didn't grow up blind, I asked her if I could use her story as the inspiration for a scripted binaural experience, a radio play that would let people FEEL what it was like to grow up blind, to experience what it's like to be written off before you've even left school. Many of the scenes in the play actually happened to Libby, including the school career advice to be a gym receptionist rather than an athlete, and (unbelievably!) the angry parent accidentally broadcasting his complaint over the school sports day tannoy.

This was a passion project for me. I spent hours in a windowless room with a sound engineer, out at an athletics track recording sound effects with binaural microphones, and recruiting Don't Panic staff (including myself!) to record the voice parts.

And then Blind Children UK merged with Guide Dogs UK and the entire project was put on hold. It launched late, with no fanfare, no supporting social media campaign, no PR from Libby Clegg... but despite the lack of numbers, it's still one of my favourite pieces of work ever. Get your headphones out, watch the video and let me know what you think.

Channel 4 - Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Channel 4 needed to reach the legions of British comic fans, sci-fi enthusiasts and nerds (it’s ok to say that if you are one) that were their prime target for the launch of Agents of SHIELD. And not just that, but remind them that it was about to start.

We created fake Police Incident signs and seeded them overnight before the show in strategically important spots around Manchester and London.

"WE ARE APPEALING FOR WITNESSES. Can you help us?" began the signs, before describing a key moment in the plot of the first episode: "Suspected extraordinary activity. On Tuesday 24th September a hooded male jumped from a 5th storey building and survived after carrying out a dramatic rescue. DID YOU SEE OR HEAR ANYTHING? Please call the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (SHIELD). 0207 346 6828.

The telephone number triggered a recorded message: "All of our operatives are currently busy working the cases that SHIELD haven't yet classified – the strange and the unknown. The case you are calling about has now been closed, but as part of the agency’s new transparency initiative we will be broadcasting the video of the event in question on Friday 27th September at 8pm on Channel 4."

To our great delight, the sign was photographed and Tweeted by then-king-of-Twitter Stephen Fry before he realised it was a stunt, which itself made headlines on The Independent, Buzzfeed and MSN Entertainment; and almost 2,500 people called our hotline.