As proud Brits (and one Australian) we love the UK, so working on a campaign that showed it off was right up our street. Partnering with M&C Saatchi Sports & Entertainment, we recently worked on the GREAT ‘See Things Differently’ Campaign. 

The idea was to develop a campaign that showcases the dynamic and modern face of the UK  featuring some of the UK’s biggest names. The best way we thought to showcase ‘GREAT’ Britain was to have our talent interact with American misconceptions of the UK. Imagine handing Gordon Ramsay this tweet, “I’ve been to the UK many times and the food is terrible, mostly served with Ham.”(Written by an American.) You can probably predict his reaction. 

Our objective was to encourage Americans to come to the UK to see we’re more than Downton Abbey, castles and cups of tea. We wanted to make light-hearted, social-first content to show off what the UK has to offer in various fields such as food, tech, design etc. So, we created a series of ‘Mean Tweets’ style videos using the access to the amazing talent we had such as the aforementioned Gordon Ramsay, Joan Collins, Rio Ferdinand, Hugh Bonneville, Dina Asher-Smith, Katherine Jenkins, Nyome Nicholas-Williams, Sharon Carpenter and Kelly Hoppen. Each talent was handed a tweet or survey written by an American about a misconception of the UK. Once our talent shared their authentic response, we backed that up with statistics and relevant stock footage. 

We delivered the videos in two formats - Individual cutdowns of the talent's full response for distributed on their own channels and a compilation cut for GREAT to seed out on their own platforms as well as use as targeted ads to people in the USA, particularly in NYC. All in all with different formats and sizes, plus teasers we delivered 41 videos and the results spoke for themselves. The video series would also serve as support for the upcoming GREAT activations and events in New York City.

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The campaign reached an amazing total of 34 million people on Facebook and 5.3 million on Twitter – roughly 14% of US adults on Facebook and 7% of US adults on Twitter. We had over 14 million video views across both the platforms and Joan Collins's individual video drove the strongest performance on Facebook - viewers were 2.5 times more engaged than any other content. On Twitter, the NY Launch content – Mean Tweets & Phone Boxes drove the strongest performance, particularly Katherine Jenkins's video with over 520K video views closely followed by Hugh Bonneville's at 495K.

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