Phill & Darren

When completing any kind of home improvement, there is often a sense of pride that you just can’t contain.

This was the basis of the pitch winning brand campaign – that the DIY giant Wickes has everything its customers need to make them feel as house proud as a peacock.

The TV campaign follows people browsing in a showroom, selecting designs and imagining the inevitable compliments they’ll receive from family and friends. As they watch this play out they are overwhelmed with an all-consuming rush of house pride.

Directed by Neil Gorringe

Directors: thirtytwo

Our first campaign for online supermarket Ocado, demonstrating how shoppers can quickly add to their basket as and when inspiration strikes, no matter how inopportune the moment. Rather than the chore of doing the entire big shop in one go.

The campaign marks an evolution in the brand’s advertising and sees a tonal shift towards naturally observed moments of everyday life.

Director: Ed Morris

This year’s festive campaign for Heathrow looks to avoid the traditional Christmas cliches, instead ‘On This Day’ focuses on intimate moments between travellers departing for their festive journeys and the memories they share on the way.

Giant 3D animated microwaves popped up on full motion digital sites all over the UK, accompanied by the satisfying sounds of the cooking popcorn inside the bag. The disruptive campaign also featured as static 48 sheets.

The infamous Wagatha Christie case kicked off when Colleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of leaking posts from her private Instagram to The Sun. The dispute blew up and escalated to the High Court of Justice.

 The UK found the resulting courtroom drama hugely entertaining, and as it played out the courtroom drawings themselves became a constant source of amusement online.

 Butterkist just had to pop up and enjoy the moment with the nation, timing our run for the final day of the case with print and social media placements.

The national press pounced on the work with The Daily Mail, The Star and The Express being first to react, resulting in an overall combined reach of over 25 million.

Director: Molly Burdett

The Christmas campaign for Heathrow airport marks the first work for the brand since winning the pitch earlier in the year, launching the ‘Depart as you mean to go on’ positioning.

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust encourages us all not only to remember those who lost their lives in the Holocaust, but they also provide a wealth of free resources for everyone to learn lessons from the horrific events of the past.

On Memorial Day the work ran in national press and key digital outdoor sites around the UK as a poignant reminder and to help provoke people to explore this important topic further.

Photographers: Shaw & Shaw

Director: Vince Squibb

Launched at The Houses of Parliament by Cosmopolitan in partnership with Karma Nirvana, this promotional cover utilised the plastic bag commonly found around women’s magazines.

It drove awareness of the campaign for an annual National Day of Memory for the British girls who have lost their lives to ‘honour’ killings – girls like Shafilea Ahmed, who was suffocated with a plastic bag by her parents for refusing an arranged marriage.

An annual National Day of Memory has now been declared at the Houses of Parliament; July 14th, Shafilea Ahmed’s Birthday.

Director: Dougal Wilson

In the UK, once someone has a criminal conviction they have to declare it by ticking a box on the application form whenever they apply for a job. This invites automatic rejection and in most cases makes finding employment almost impossible. Being unemployed makes them significantly more likely to reoffend – in turn costing the UK economy £11bn per year.

BITC is tackling this by calling on UK employers to create a fair opportunity for ex-offenders by removing this tick-box from application forms – allowing all applicants to be assessed equally.

Our approach was to create a moment where people were confronted by their own prejudice towards ex-offenders – maybe one they were unaware they even had. To do this we put the viewer in the position of an interviewer, face-to-face with a young interviewee explaining that he'd recently left prison.

The resulting work was the first interactive pre-roll ever to use the familiar 'Skip Ad' button in an unfamiliar way.

To experience the interactive film click here

National OOH campaign

Director: Chris Palmer

Launching at half time during the Manchester United vs Liverpool Premier League match, the Bet Regret campaign aims to encourage self-reflection among 16-34 men who gamble frequently on their phones. We wanted them to identify with that all-too-familiar feeling of instant regret after placing an impulsive bet they know they shouldn’t have made.

The campaign addresses the three types of bet proven as the greatest risk areas for developing gambling addictions: chasing losses, drunk betting and bored betting.

Young men who carry, or are considering carrying knives, are an almost impossible section of society to connect with via traditional advertising.

However, the one person they respect above others and will listen to is their mother.

The Shout Out To My Son campaign gave real mums with real fears for their sons’ lives, the chance to make an unexpected emotional plea on Mother’s Day.

Director: Tom Tagholm

Director: thirtytwo

Director: Gary Freedman

Director: Tom Tagholm

Arthritis affects over ten million people in the UK, and as such we all know someone who is living with the condition. The impact on individuals is huge, yet the pain and fatigue caused is invisible and can fluctuate massively from day to day. Despite this and the significant social and economic impact, there is a severe lack of understanding and trivialisation of arthritis among the public.

The campaign encourages the UK public to challenge our collective acceptance and dismissal of the condition as ‘just a bit of arthritis’ and speak out against it. 

The three 30-second films each depict a person with arthritis reflecting on a good day when they are not in pain, from the contrasting viewpoint of a bad day when they are struggling with the condition.

The Versus Arthritis campaign is our first after renaming and rebranding the merger between the brands, Arthritis Research UK and Arthritis Care.

We named, built and launched the Versus Arthritis brand in its entirety after a merger between the leading arthritis foundations.

Director: Ne-o

The nation took the Cat and Budgie ad to its heart but there was a certain recurring social media question that deserved an answer.  We responded with a series of short online films unveiling their offspring – a half-kitten, half-budgie lovechild named Trevor.

TV/Cinema

Director: Ben Liam Jones

Arthritis is one of the biggest public health issues facing the UK. Yet it is all too often passed off as being an inevitable or even an accepted part of getting older. This perception is wrong, it completely underestimates the condition.

Over 10 million people of all ages in the UK are living with arthritis. For people who have arthritis, just getting through the day is difficult. The condition also has a significant, but hidden, impact on wider society. Whether it’s an employer who loses out on the skills of an employee who has the condition – over 30 million working days being lost every year due to it – a child who misses out on being looked after by their parents or grandparents, or the strain on the NHS’s resources, the impact of arthritis is being felt across the whole of society. 

The Nation’s Joint Problem campaign seeks to reveal the true impact of arthritis, to raise societal awareness that, either directly or indirectly, arthritis is a condition that affects everyone in the UK.

A collaboration with Sam Brown and The Line to create a detailed animation, which took over a year in development. The story plays out in an Orwellian world where a militia of evil TVs brainwashes inhabitants to ‘conform’, ‘upgrade’ and ‘subscribe’. We follow the story of a freedom-fighting young TV who meets up with a girl, frustrated with her TV options and the pair, along with her cute dog, escape to a brave new world of free-to-air television.

As a teaser for the main film, the evil TVs seemingly hacked broadcasts of the innocent Cat and Budgie advert. The widespread social media intrigue far exceeded our expectations and set the scene perfectly for the oncoming ad.

To see the making-of click here

Bump - Peter Thwaites Tango - Tom Carty

During a particularly heavy winter, the entire UK was blanketed in snow. This was a brief opportunity to use snow as a blank canvas, an original and pure medium. Taking advantage of the adverse weather, we produced a tactical ambient idea, the ‘Polo snow stamp’. When stamped in thick fresh snow it left a near-perfect replica of the iconic mint.