#MerryCritmas - A global campaign to help kickstart junior creative careers

Christmas is all about giving.
Merry Critmas is a campaign encouraging professional creatives in the advertising and marketing fields to give the gift of a festive portfolio review, or "book crit".
For undiscovered talent trying to break into advertising, it’s a foot in the door.
For established creatives, it’s a nice way of giving something back.

Father Critmas was back in December 2020, for the 5th year running, to match young creatives with Creative Directors around the world for Zoom book crits. This time he was in the gym delivering a Joe Wicks inspired 'Creative Workout' to help students/grads get their portfolios in shape!!

We partnered with The Drum, Adland, NABS, Cut The Crap NYC, GAS and had hundreds of senior and junior creatives getting involved. At a time that junior creatives need it most, we’re really pleased to have got this campaign out there despite the difficulties in shooting film etc at the moment. We are really pleased to help create some amazing opportunities that will hopefully lead to a brighter 2021 for young creatives and give the senior creatives that feel-good factor from helping them.

Sign up to give or receive a crit for 2021 at merrycritmas.com!!!

In it’s 4th year, the campaign went from strength to strength as Father Critmas produced and starred in his own music video. This was a parody of Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ and was produced by GAS Music with BBC Radio’s Mike Sweeney on vocals. The film featured band Federal Charm and creative students from local universities.

The campaign was also being supported by NABS, Unity Radio, The Drum and pushed further via our very own @OneMinuteBriefs and @AgencyQuotes channels. Alongside ourselves, David Felton, Lizzie Owen and Louise Chorley were the lead elves on the project and over the past few years we have created close to a thousand book crit matches across the world.

We put together a case study film of the campaign too.

The campaign has always been led by film and the previous year’s film, which was produced by Trunk, was a horror parody of IT movie and in the first year we were a fly on the wall during one of Father Critmas’ infamous book crits. These have helped us get into global creative publications and encourage big names to sign up such as Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy, Victoria Buchanan of Tribal Worldwide, Mike Rigby of RGA New York, Carole Davids of HeyHuman, Shaun McIlrath of Iris Worldwide and many more.

We also filmed ‘Behind The Scenes’ which reveals a bit more about what Father Critmas is like to work with. He likes to write, produce, direct and star in his own films.

#YoungLifeWriters - Bringing the poetry of Emma Sykes to life through spoken word

Spoken-word artist, Emma Sykes, approached us to create a series of films capturing her beautiful poetry and bring it to life after meeting her and her family at a Team High Sheriff event where Emma featured as a fellow ambassador. Using the base location of her parents’ family business, The Haven in Greenfield, we shot Emma’s spoken word performance in a variety of backgrounds mixed with cutaways of the stunning surroundings and wildlife. Music accompanying the footage was performed by Ambiere.

In the latest film, we juxtaposed the beautiful nature shots with industrial shots from the Northern Quarter district of Manchester to give it a different feel and reflect the content of the poem.

This film will be entered into an award to promote Emma’s work and all of the films are to be used as inspiration for another project the family run called https://twitter.com/YoungLifeWriter where 16-25 year olds are encouraged to share their stories and thoughts through their words.

We look forward to doing more of these films in the future!!

#BreatheLife - Campaigning to end loneliness in the elderly

Encouraging young people to ask elders for advice & end loneliness

Loneliness is one of the greatest causes of death in older people. In the UK alone, a fifth of older people feel lonely ALL the time. We wanted to help change that and worked with The Gate Films to develop a campaign through kindness.org. This involved us creating a film with the concept coming out of one of our One Minute Briefs social campaigns based on the silence older people hear every day with no-one to talk to.

We developed a system involving simple email request for wise advice, to help restore feelings of self worth in older people and helped younger people gain valuable insight in the process. We found five brilliant older people from Cheshire in the UK. Together they had over 250 years of wisdom to offer. For 30 days, they were available to offer their thoughts questions younger people may have.

The campaign inspired lots more people to get involved as many comments and questions were sent in and responded to. This has also sparked conversation online with people pledging to devote their time to others on an ongoing basis. We are very proud to have been involved in this great initiative and see the difference it has made to the lives of others.

#HappyEarthDay - Sending a special message about climate change to the President

Working collaboratively with Tara Button and HeyBigMan, we delivered a message about climate change direct to the White House for Donald Trump’s birthday.

To do this, we changed the lyrics to the Stevie Wonder classic and worked with Gas Music to create a music video starring the one and only Ronald Dump!! This featured in various media publications and coincided with a One Minute Briefs campaign that we ran to create posters around the President’s birthday that shared a powerful message about climate change.

We created a website for the content to sit on, which also featured ways of converting to green energy easily for site visitors and provided a platform for people to send their own messages to the President. These were collated and implemented into a ‘HappyEarthday’ card that was sent direct to the White House.

#InsightsOnTap - Delivering marketing messages with Response Tap

We were approached by Response Tap to come up with a concept and produce their informative videos to help marketeers discover where they can improve their marketing and how call-tracking can help with that. Our ideas was to create an informal setting and make the topics more of an informal discussion between members of staff. And, what better location for Response Tap, than the local taproom. These videos have helped convey messages to current and prospective customers for the brand and we hope to do more of these in the near future.

#GOGOLDMCR - Turning Manchester gold for the Olympic homecoming parade

With just over a week to go before the Olympic & Paralympic homecoming parade, we decided to do something to welcome home our heroes. With so many of the medals coming from the North, we thought why not turn Manchester gold?! So, to start things off, we got Johnny Vegas involved, with him calling the people of Manchester to Go Gold and we worked with local brands to give some great prizes away. We ran a One Minute Briefs campaign to create some great user generated content and encouraged many brands to turn their logos gold for the day. The hashtag #GoGoldMCR went crazy on the day with lots of people getting involved. Metrolink even turned one of their trams fully gold and Nissan brought along a fleet of gold cars! Our gold glittery hats created a sea of gold that was mentioned by the presenters, athletes, press and on TV. Even the typical Manchester rain couldn’t dampen the spirits as a rainbow appeared leading right into the goldness at the Town Hall. We even reached national press the next day with all the headlines about how Gold it was. Winning.