Big-little ideas
Over the years there have been lots of little ideas that worked disproportionately hard or just bring a smile to my face...
Sometimes it’s the little, quick ideas that give you the most. When promoting an early season of Game of Thrones we had a bunch of Iron Throne seat covers mad and sent them to fans. It gave us an absurb amount of reach for very little, but I’m most proud of Stephen Fry posting about it. Remember those mini Mini cars that ferried things around the Olympics park? There was a bit of a kerfuffle about brands on the field, so all branding was removed. When they became a surprise hit of the Games dedicated social channels for them, with a distinct tone of voice , helped us connect with the millions of fans who craved for more. So many Brits find themselves in a pickle whilst abroad, from being stranded without support to a life-changing bill after accidents. The Foreign Office struggled to get travellers to visit their site their official travel advice, which can determine whether your travel insurance is valid in a particular country when you travel. We conceived and created an API that enabled thousands of travel sites to embed the relevant live advice onto their pages, and we got hundreds of the biggestest site to embed the relevant live info onto thier pages. This in-situ reach utterly eclipsed that on their site and had an impact on how many people were covered abroad. A picture of a gov.uk web page doesn’t convey quite how sexy this is. Reddit AMA’s are where the pubic get to ask interesting and important people questions. Obama’s AMA is still the biggest and most famous but world wide web inventor TIm Burners-Lee’s is still one of the most commented on. We convinced him to do it and ran the process end-to-end, fielding questions and managing his replies. He’s a jolly good egg. During lockdown our recycling bins overflowed. DS Smith do Amazon’s packaging and are one of the world’s biggest cardboard suppliers. We helped then lobby for change in recycling infrastructure acros Europe that wasn’t built for our behaviour with bins that represented how much the average family needed to recycle. Air Wick launched their Botanica line of air fresheners (made with real ingredients) with a scheme to rewild large areas across the UK. That means millions of new homes for wildlife, so we launched Botanica Estates to showcase the new residences. Steve Backshall was our champion estate agent and a partnership with Zoopla that featured quirky listings. I learnt that the people that deal with the animals literally freeze the butterflies and warm them up to bring them to life. It still freaks me out. The mice were always seen as a minor character but they stole the show. Competition for eBay sellers business was a big deal for delivery companies like myHermes was rife, but they were hard to get through to. Using eBay’s data API, we built a new listing system that showed the most effective and highest-selling Powersellers in each of the hundreds of sub-categories in eBay. The PowerSellerIndex attracted thousands of sellers and gave them offers to win their business. We couldn’t save myHermes, but it helped keep them afloat. Aussie wanted to reconnect with the badass attitude that the brand launched with year ago. There’s little more badass than a sassy older lady, so we hired Baddie Winkle as the face of the brand.