How many times have you walked into someone’s house, didn’t like the look of what you saw, didn’t say anything about it and just went off them a little bit? If you did, then you’re not alone.

This summer, we were tasked with helping to inspire better mental health, following new research which revealed that 72% of Brits agree that their current home interior is good for their mental health.

The study, which was commissioned for 2021 International Wallpaper Week, also revealed that we’re quick to judge friends, family and new partners on the way they’ve decorated their home, but we stay quiet about it, whilst 75% said the design of their own home was very important, and 63% said it was important to them because it made them feel happier.

To help inspire Brits to create a space that’s not only about personal choice, but also about creating a space that’s good for our mental health, we enrolled the help of TV presenter, home interiors expert and Samaritans charity ambassador Scarlett Moffat to launch a new wallpaper, Superfresco Easy, to inspire happiness and get people to understand the small interior changes that can make a difference Things like bright colours, more light and the reduction of clutter can do wonders for us.

Through an integrated social and broadcast campaign, we made Graham and Brown and Samaritans part of the mental health conversation, resulting in a hugely successful campaign which secured 155 pieces of broadcast coverage in top tier outlets including Stephs Packed Lunch, Sky News Radio and Heart Radio. The campaign also resulted in a total audience reach of 47M, driving mass market awareness of Superfresco Easy wallpaper.

New research by Swim England, the governing body for swimming in England, found that the average child stops having swimming lessons at seven and a half years old, meaning 3.4 million youngsters are stopping lessons too early – a figure which has risen during the coronavirus pandemic.

That is in stark comparison to the 3.4 million youngsters who are stopping lessons too early – a figure which has risen during the coronavirus pandemic. They include being able to swim at least 100 metres without stopping, treading water for at least 30 seconds, experience swimming in clothing and being able to ‘float to live’ (performing a star float on their back for at least 30 seconds).The research also looked into how much time parents spend with their children in the pool. Nearly three-quarters (72%) said they hadn’t been swimming with their children in the last month or even longer.

To highlight the startling fact that so many youngsters are failing to meet swimming competencies post covid, we brought on board two experts in the field, Olympic gold medallist Duncan Goodhew and Jane Nickerson MBE, Swim England Chief Executive, to talk about Swim England’s ‘Learn to Swim’ programme.

The result? Our outreach drove coverage in 140 commercial stations across the UK and in top tier national outlets including Channel 5, BBC London TV, Sky News Radio and GB News. We also conducted interviews with a series of BBC regional outlets including BBC Radio Nottingham, BBC Radio Wiltshire, BBC Radio Somerset and BBC Radio Leicester.

In doing so, we got the nation talking about the importance of not only ensuring kids become competent swimmers, but how they can also enjoy the huge physical and mental health benefits that exercising in the water can bring.

Record-breaking temperatures and months of severe drought fuelled a series of massive bushfires across Australia from late 2019 to March 2020. An estimated 1.2bn animals perished and thousands of homes have been destroyed.

But as the fires were slowly put out, Australia faced a whole new issue – a decline in tourism with increasing numbers of holiday-makers cancelling the trips they had planned. This was in part due to the dissemination of photoshopped images on social media showing the entire country going up flames.

Last year tourism contributed more than $47 billion to the Australian economy but this ‘fake news’ was repelling holiday-makers at a time when the economy needed them most.

One particular area that was hit hardest by the fire was the pristine Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Australia’s third largest island, home to koalas, kangaroos and some of the most idyllic beaches Australia has to offer.

We were tasked by the South Australia Tourism Commission to create a ‘bushfire recovery campaign’ to dispel these myths and show the UK holidaymakers that Australia is very much open for business as well as to drive donations for Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park.

We developed a broadcast first strategy to ‘show rather than tell’, providing UK viewers with a direct line to an expert bushcraft spokesperson, emotive interviews with local business owners and myth dispelling footage of stunning beaches.

This year Arden University is launching a new MBA course in association with one of the UK’s most prominent business leaders, Dame Karren Brady. It has a particular focus on promoting so-called ‘soft skills’, helping students develop their communication and negotiation skills, as well as resilience and the ability to ‘speak up and be heard’ in the workplace. To make as much noise as possible about the course, we worked with them to develop a story based around the skills that businesses are looking for from graduates.

Once we established that the campaign was strong enough to go to the media with, we worked with HSBC to determine the best angles and how to pitch to journalists to get maximum exposure. We helped to identify two distinct audiences – global and domestic – and tailored our approaches accordingly by offering different spokespeople from within the business that we knew would be of interest to different programmes.

How do you promote an obscure German play that is only performed every ten years since a small town in Bavaria? This was the challenge facing The German National Tourist Board when they approached us for support – hardly a straightforward brief!

With tickets already on sale we had to create a reason for broadcasters to speak to our spokesperson now as opposed to March 2020 when performances would commence.

We framed the interview against the backdrop of a recent research trip to Jerusalem that we positioned as the “official” start of rehearsals but because of the lack of news hook and the subject matter, the campaign called for a unique approach to media relations. This was not a case of using our black book of contacts or playing the numbers game via blanket emails to multiple outlets. We drew up a list of religious programmes on national and regional TV and radio outlets (our spokesperson was the man playing Jesus after all) and set up about creating a database of the producers we knew would be interested in the story. Good, old fashioned, phone bashing and establishing relationships with the right journalists on the day.