Focus on... the North West

What a privilege to introduce this celebration of the extraordinary talent and effectiveness coming out of Manchester and the North West.

Our region is defined by its energy, ambition and an appetite for pushing boundaries, and this work shows just that. Ranging from established global networks to thriving independent agencies, it's fantastic to see such a great range of campaigns.

This collection is a testament to the brilliant work happening across our community every day, and it's a real joy to champion the people and agencies behind these success stories. I hope you find this showcase as inspiring as I do.

BBC: Havas Media Manchester

The challenge

When The Traitors Series 1 launched in November 2022, just 5% of under-35s tuned in. Despite over 50% awareness, younger audiences had dismissed it as another traditional game show from a legacy broadcaster that didn't feel relevant to them.

Yet the BBC and Havas Media UK saw potential. The show had all the ingredients younger audiences love: dark psychology, social gameplay, authentic characters, and endless meme-ability. The challenge was to reposition The Traitors and prove that BBC entertainment could be culturally relevant in an era of streaming platforms and social media.

The insight and strategy

Havas brand driver analysis revealed that Buzz and Word of Mouth were the biggest drivers of entertainment brand consideration among under-35s. If their friends weren't talking about the show, they weren't going to watch it.

Despite the headlines, younger audiences weren’t rejecting television outright and they would still come together for appointment to view content. They gravitate toward formats that invite participation: theorising, meme-making, and watching stories unfold in real time across social platforms.

Rather than following the conventional broadcaster playbook, Havas and the BBC behaved differently. We showed up like a social entertainment brand: agile, interactive, reactive, and culturally connected. Instead of explaining the format, the campaign evoked the feeling of the show: fear, suspicion, and obsession.

The execution

The approach evolved into a fully "in-play" communications model, transforming the show into a live cultural event. Real-world activations embedded the show into gyms, student accommodations, and pubs with cryptic, sinister messaging. Reactive OOH like the Diane and Linda billboards capitalised on fan-led moments in near real-time, while a social-first approach shifted budget into post-transmission phases to amplify conversation at its natural peak. Platform expansion included TikTok Content Suite, Reddit, BeReal, and Snapchat to meet audiences where they live. Iconic executions like the White Cliffs of Dover projection and Bonfire Night AdVan delivered finale-worthy impact, while companion content kept viewers hooked beyond the broadcast.

The results

In just three years, The Traitors underwent one of the most remarkable brand transformations in recent BBC history. What started as a show dismissed by younger viewers evolved into a cultural powerhouse that dominated social feeds and water-cooler conversations across the nation.

Awareness amongst under-35s nearly doubled to 93%, while familiarity and relevance metrics soared. Today, 80% of under-35s feel familiar with the show, and 75% say it feels "for me" a complete reversal from the initial perception of it being just another traditional game show.

Total viewing surged from 5 million to 15 million adults, while under-35 viewership trebled from 1.1 million to 3.2 million. Those younger viewers have now spent over 174 million hours with The Traitors content on TV and iPlayer alone, a testament to the show's ability to captivate an audience that initially rejected it.

The first series of The Celebrity Traitors 2025 marked the culmination of this transformation. It became not just the biggest BBC title of 2025, but achieved the largest on-demand audience of any BBC series ever, with 2.5 million under-35s streaming on iPlayer. Perhaps most tellingly, the show is now the most popular television series amongst under-35s on any platform outperforming streaming juggernauts like Stranger Things, Baby Reindeer, and Clarkson's Farm.

Cloud Nine: Vega Comms

 

Context:

Cloud Nine was founded as a challenger to ghd, but after 15 years growth had plateaued. Awareness was static, brand search was declining and the category was becoming increasingly competitive, with Dyson and Shark bringing significantly larger budgets. Cloud Nine needed a distinctive reason for consumers to choose it — and pay a premium.

Idea:

A disconnect was identified between modern beauty culture and hair-tool marketing. While skincare had embraced health, care and inclusivity, hair styling remained dominated by perfection and damaging high heat.

The answer was found in Cloud Nine’s revolutionary Revive Mode® technology that enabled effective styling at lower, kinder temperatures. This product truth provided a powerful brand idea — Strength Through Kindness — reframing healthy hair as strong hair and giving Cloud Nine an emotionally distinctive position in the category.

Execution:

With £650k, our challenge was to create disproportionate impact. Rather than spreading investment thinly, we made Channel 4 our solus media partner, securing matched media value and combining fame-building TV with targeted VOD and branded content that ran on social media, supporting the TV activity.

TV delivered scale, while 4Studio’s #GRWM: Roots & Resilience brought the strategy to life through honest stories from women at different life stages, naturally connecting hair health, confidence and self-care.

Impact:

The campaign delivered £1.4m media value, reached 5.2m women aged 35–54, and generated 3.1m #GRWM views. Online sales increased 48% while on air, while spontaneous awareness rose to 24% — ahead of ghd, Dyson and Shark.

Why it matters:

By combining a genuine product advantage with a culturally relevant insight and a focused media partnership, we helped Cloud Nine redefine what strength means in haircare — turning kindness into a powerful platform for brand and commercial growth.

Crown Paints: Notorious Communications

 

The challenge:

Crown Paints’ “Life Stories” creative era was ending, with the new strategy not landing until H2 2026. That left a gap: stay visible through the key decorating period with no new creative assets and a limited budget, or go dark and hand ground to Dulux and newer challengers.

The idea:

Rather than let missing assets limit ambition, we rethought what media could do. Millennial Home Improvers don’t take inspiration from four walls alone — food and travel matter just as much. So we connected those passions to Crown’s ambition to lead the category on colour, turning paint from a functional DIY product into something personal.

The result was “Colour Your Senses with Crown Paints & Good Food”: a first-of-its-kind partnership with Immediate Media fusing food, travel and colour across video, social, digital, print and interactive formats. Good Food’s talent created the content, so we delivered a rich campaign without traditional production costs.

The execution:

• A three-part video series pairing a country, cuisine, colour and room in each episode, run across Good Food’s YouTube (450k+ subscribers) and social
• Three digital advertorials and a content hub linking each colour story to its shade
• An interactive “infinity” skin letting users spin between a Crown colour and a recipe
• Three magazine sponsorships weaving Crown’s palette through the issues

The impact:

• 17.8m impressions, 6.8m video views, 2.3m Millennial Home Improvers reached
• 32% video completion rate, against a 10–20% benchmark
• 2.7m combined print readership, 50% above plan
• Purchase intent up 150%
• Tester pot sales up as much as 150% on hero shades

Why it matters:

Colour becomes more powerful with a story behind it. By turning a creative gap into the campaign’s engine, media stopped being a distribution channel and became the idea itself.

InjuryLawyers4U: Open Partners

The challenge:

For leading personal injury firm InjuryLawyers4U (IL4U), Organic and Paid Search have long been two key channels driving growth, consistently delivering high-ROI and incremental leads.

In 2025, those channels were coming under threat, with consumer search behaviour rapidly shifting as they turned to LLMs for recommendations on which brands to trust in the personal injury space.

To defend IL4U’s #1 market position and to safeguard their Organic Search performance, Open Partners had to engineer and execute a high impact AI visibility strategy that would drive rapid visibility, authority, and lead generation through LLMs.

The solution: The Organic Powerhouse

Knowing that driving visibility in LLMs requires a multi-layered approach involving high authority media mentions through original data, contextual keyword relevance, and authentic social proof, we assembled The Organic Powerhouse: a dedicated team combining expertise across PR, Organic Social, Influencers, and SEO.

Targeting each Personal Injury category with laser precision, our team carried out surveys to strategically inform PR pieces, developed targeted category-themed content to improve keyword positions, leveraged Organic Social to educate followers on IL4U’s expertise, and partnered with relevant Influencers to drive authentic reach.

Across all categories, we repeated and optimised this process, enabling IL4U to rapidly and continuously grow their AI visibility and leads with a strong ROI.

Early results

One of our earliest categories, Cycling, showed rapid, demonstrable growth, delivering the below between September and November 2026:

Visibility:

• 98th to 10th most visible Personal Injury brand in AI search
• +33% TikTok search visibility

Mentions:

• 5th most mentioned brand (+11 places MoM) across all tracked topical clusters and prompts
• +28.6% brand mention visibility score across all topics and platforms (Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Co-Pilot)

Share of voice:

• +5,400% from earned media

Long-term effectiveness:

To quantify the longer term effectiveness of our work, we measured the incremental impact of our organic activity through Dynamic Econometrics, our in-house MMM solution that uses machine learning to identify the true contribution of The Organic Powerhouse against IL4U’s main business KPIs.

As of September 2026, our econometric analysis confirmed that we not only protected IL4U’s organic performance, but supercharged it through a future-focused approach fit for the AI era of search:

• The #1 most visible Personal Injury brand in ChatGPT
• A £7.6 blended ROI across The Organic Powerhouse:
  • Organic Search / Digital PR: £6.8 ROI
  • Influencers: £10.8 ROI
  • Organic Social: £8.5 ROI

Matalan: Havas Market

 

The context:

In 2026, retailers continue to operate in a highly competitive and pressured environment, owing to the cost-of-living crisis, rising operating costs, intense competition from online marketplaces and value-led brands, and an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

For brands such as Matalan, this creates a particular challenge: how to communicate affordability without allowing value perceptions to overshadow style, quality and relevance. In this climate, changing consumer perceptions is critical to driving consideration and encouraging shoppers to look beyond established brand assumptions.

The idea:

AW 2026 marked a step change for Matalan, with a newly elevated and style-led Autumn/Winter collection landing. The media campaign needed to match this product elevation by challenging perceptions, driving reappraisal and demonstrating that Matalan can deliver quality and style without compromising value. The resulting campaign was Believe It’s Matalan, rooted in a tease and reveal mechanic.

The execution:

In a true cross-agency effort, Havas Market launched the Believe Pop-Up Store at Westfield White City: a completely unbranded red box, housing a styling-studio experience. Visitors explored the AW collection, received personalised styling advice and only discovered the brand behind Believe at checkout or exit. This approach removed all preconceptions and truly allowed the product to create the first impression.

This notion was amplified through tease and reveal murals in London and Liverpool, and a bespoke Believe mini-magazine distributed across London Fashion Week in partnership with ELLE. All supported via a fully integrated media campaign spanning TV, OLV, OOH, paid social and digital.

The impact:

The campaign is still in flight - but Believe content has already strongly outperformed Matalan’s usual engagement levels. The campaign has generated significant noise, with a raft of social content and 10+ organic articles featuring the campaign. Social listening shows overwhelming positive reception, and early YouGov results have indicated increases in consideration, purchase intent and quality perceptions for Matalan.

Sofology: TBWA\MCR

 

The challenge:

Make Sofology stand out and stand for something in a sofa retail park of cosy sameness.

They already had gorgeous, well-crafted, beautifully designed sofas. They had a team who were just as quietly carefully discerning as the audience we needed to target. We just needed a rallying point that joined all these things up.

Fussy, it turns out is the strongest F word we needed. Generally seen as a bit of a negative. But for our audience and the Sofology brand it's about high standards, knowing exactly what you want and not settling for anything less. By uncovering this simple human truth about our core customers, we translated this mindset into a strong, distinctive, witty creative idea that gave the brand stand out.

The results:

• 26% sales increase.
• 70% increase in web traffic.
• 5.5★ rating in System1 testing, placing the ad in the top 0.1% of all ads.
• 7% year-on-year growth.
• #1 share of Voice for the first 5 weeks of the campaign, ahead of DFS and IKEA.

Two Minutes of Chat & an Early Screening: Vivid Everywhere

 

Context:

Cancer outcomes are closely linked to early diagnosis, but in Halton, fear, stigma and low awareness were creating barriers to screening. The challenge for Cheshire & Merseyside Cancer Alliance was to reach working-class communities with vital information about cervical, breast and bowel cancer - without producing another clinical health campaign people could easily ignore.

The task was simple but significant: increase awareness, get people talking about cancer and encourage more people to take up screening.

Idea:

Our starting point was an everyday human truth: conversations happen everywhere, but very few are about cancer.

So instead of telling people to “be more aware”, we set out to make cancer easier to talk about.

Two Minutes of Chat & an Early Screening turned a difficult subject into an ordinary conversation, using humour, local pride and familiar faces to remove fear and make early detection feel relevant.

With Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps created and set in Runcorn, we reunited writer Susan Nickson with stars Ralf Little and Will Mellor, alongside real Halton residents, creating conversations that felt unmistakably local, warm and authentic.

Execution:

Seven films formed the heart of an integrated campaign, supported by hyper-local activity designed to appear in the places conversations naturally happen.

Beer mats in pubs, coffee sleeves in cafés, markets, community spaces, Widnes Vikings matchdays and AdVan tours took the message beyond traditional healthcare environments and into everyday life.

Fifty “Campaign in a Box” toolkits gave community ambassadors films, posters and conversation starters to extend the campaign through their own networks.

The language was deliberately simple, direct and inclusive: talk about cancer, understand screening and act early.

Impact:

The campaign generated 1.3m+ impressions, reached 938,167 people and delivered 71,737 engagements.

More importantly, independent evaluation showed genuine behaviour change. 81% of people exposed to the campaign started a conversation about cancer, nearly 50% encouraged a friend or family member to attend screening, and 26% of eligible respondents said they would now book a screening appointment.

Why it matters:

Two Minutes of Chat showed what happens when public health communication feels like the community it is trying to reach.

By replacing clinical language with culture, humour and conversation, creativity didn’t simply generate attention - it helped turn awareness into action.

Yankee Candle: The Behaviours Agency

 

The challenge:

Home fragrance is booming. But Yankee Candle, the global leader in premium fragrance, was fast becoming another forgettable fragrance brand. They were struggling for relevance in fragmented EMEA and APAC markets and facing aggressive price-based competition. They needed to reclaim perception as a premium product by transitioning from simply selling scents to creating a deep emotional connection.

The business appointed The Behaviours Agency and used our Create Fame program to move beyond product features and create a campaign that would generate notoriety, create relevance and ensure the brand showed up distinctly, justifying its premium position.

Our strategy:

We applied our Motivation + Memorability approach to begin the process of audience behaviour change. Our strategy identified motivations across different audiences: the ‘Serenity Seeker’ is motivated by de-stressing, and the ‘Mood Maker’ seeks to create social ambience. We found that both segments value fragrance as an essential ritual to create these scarce and desired moments.

This created the opportunity to position Yankee Candle’s unmatched consistency and room-filling fragrance as unique triggers for these emotional moments. By making Yankee Candle the essential element for these rituals, we created a powerful hook to drive brand fame and emotional resonance.

Creative solution:

Building on the ‘A Fragrance for Every Moment’ platform, we developed a campaign that amplifies the power of fragrance to transform real-life experiences into sensory memories.

Distinctive, hyper-real and serene scenes visualise everyday moments elevated by Yankee Candle. The product acts as the sensory trigger for authentic experiences, connecting with people truly and deeply. Carefully created assets and messaging ensure local market teams can easily and consistently activate the campaign across a busy 12-month marketing plan.