BT Group is on a mission to help jobseekers and disadvantaged 16-24-year-olds build digital skills as they begin their career and create a diverse digital talent movement through their FastFutures programme.

Our research showed 75% of UK CEOs thought business-related digital skills were now as valuable as a degree – but over half said young job seekers often struggle with simple tasks like creating a spreadsheet or writing a professional email.

Using this insight we devised the ‘Toksbridge’ campaign to highlight how millions of school leavers were spending £50k on a degree, bossing social media but lacking the real-world digital skills BT’s Fast Futures course could provide.

Launched in A-Level results week, our coverage was led by young case studies who’d shunned uni for BT’s FastFutures course and secured a job as a result. It was supported by BT-owned research revealing the right digital skills can be as attractive to employers as a degree. Our case study approach was credited by journalists for the campaign’s success. 

  • 35 pieces of national and regional coverage including Daily Mail’s This is Money

  • Broadcast coverage across ITV regional news bulletins

  • 30 pieces of online coverage

  • 226 earned mentions of BT

  • 66 Fast Futures mentions

  • 28 back links to FastFutures website

  • Online coverage landed on high quality sites with an average domain authority score of 75

  • 511k coverage views

BT GROUP - TOKSBRIDGE

MERCEDES BENZ - GREEN VAN WOMAN

Mercedes Benz Vans wanted to reposition itself as the go-to brand for SME owners looking to make the move to electric and drive links to their online showroom.

We knew its rivals owned the traditional sole trader audience, so we took a different approach - positioning MBV as the brand for the new face of modern van drivers. 

Twenty five years after the ‘white van man’ term was coined, our research showed van drivers no longer fitted that stereotype, with almost half being women who did yoga and read The Times. It spawned a new trend - Green Van Woman.

We put people in the middle by finding a case study of a small business owner who could bring our research to life in the press, generating 46 pieces of top tier coverage including The Times, the Sun, and The i. This generated 37 backlinks to the MBV website through online coverage, with an average domain authority score of 73 and 128 earned mentions for Mercedes-Benz Vans.

And, on top of that, the campaign’s research even appeared on topical news show, Have I Got News For You which averages four million viewers.

SAGE - BRAND REFRESH LAUNCH

As part of their rebrand, Sage wanted to engage their teams in the process, establish redefined values and champion their talent.

We created a campaign that began by putting employees into readiness mode, letting them know that the customer launch was coming soon and building excitement.

With awareness building, we asked employees to get involved, recruiting a community of global contributors to share stories and become content creators. Our Sage Storytellers became our on-the-ground heroes, supporting the rebrand campaign, launch, and beyond.

We gave them a year-long calendar of Sage Storyteller missions designed to excite, delight, inform and educate, using all the key Sage comms channels, from video to blog posts. We included filmed podcasts and remotely shot films, where the Storytellers interviewed teams behind the new brand, promoting the new values with a grounded view of why they’re so important to the business and its culture.

The campaign galvanised the global audience around the rebrand launch and having consciously recruited across all regions, gave a local view of the global change, making teams feel more connected and involved in the wider change and their global Day 1 event.

MARTIN LEWIS

Regularly polling as Britain’s “Most Trusted Person” – money saving expert Martin Lewis trusts us to handle his PR. 

He asked us to devise an aggressive PR campaign to force the government to create new legislation cracking down on scam ads.

As part of a wide-ranging publicity drive, we designed our own advert made up of scam ads and paraded it in front of lawmakers in Parliament Square. To support the campaign we secured 12 high profile figures including Richard Branson, Deborah Meaden and Robbie Williams to join the fight.

We secured in excess of 1,100 pieces of coverage in top tier media including Daily Mail, The Sun, BBC Breakfast, Sky News, This Morning and the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

We have also worked on a number of other major consumer campaigns and landed profile pieces in credible media including The Sunday Times and Desert Island Discs.

AMAZON - RETURN TO THE OFFICE

As post-pandemic lockdown restrictions eased, Amazon employees were asked to return to the office as part of an official hybrid working model.

Social media was flooded with brands going viral for getting their back-to the-office message all wrong. Amazon was keen to strike the right note with their messaging and so called in the Goldbug team.

Our #WorkingFromHere campaign nailed it. We combined digital, print and large format vinyl installations that became a celebration of Amazon’s great working spaces and the benefits of being together.

What started as a simple call for employees to return to the office as part of an official hybrid working model became a global campaign, performing so well it was used across the entire business and adopted as the core theme to Amazon’s first bi-annual in-person, all staff event since lockdown, cementing the Amazon’s hybrid working approach.

BT - CAREHOME COMPANIONS

BT Group wanted to showcase Care Home Companions; a scheme set up to pair care-home residents with call-centre staff for weekly calls to tackle loneliness. It also wanted to promote its Digital Skills campaign to encourage older people to learn new skills to make the most of life online.

Knowing our target audience were aged over 70, we partnered with someone we knew they’d engage with - 1966 World Cup legend Sir Geoff Hurst - to create a powerful film and social assets.

We surprised care home resident, Bill Oliphant, and his BT call centre companion Ricky and filmed a trip to Bill’s beloved Newcastle United ground, St James’ Park, where they met Sir Geoff to tour the stadium.

They recreated the famous line from the iconic World Cup final commentary ‘They think it’s all over…it is now’ which saw Sir Geoff score in the closing moments of the game. 

Sir Geoff also taught Bill how to make his first video call back to his care home, demonstrating how digital skills can help older people stay in touch with family and friends.

Our heart-warming film and media day, with Sir Geoff talking authentically about his own online challenges and the benefits of keeping it touch using technology, helped us land over 50 pieces of the highest quality coverage including Channel 4’s Steph’s Packed Lunch, Sky News and a first-person piece from Sir Geoff in key title, the Daily Express.

“Goldbug hit the right balance between creativity and corporate comms, delivering our story with the message really cutting through.”
- Hazel Moss, Senior PR Manager, BT Group

THE BBC - VALUES REFRESH

The BBC asked us to create a comms programme that integrated their refreshed values with their external ‘Our BBC’ comms platform, to unite their teams and inspire their cultural ambitions.

Some of our most beloved characters, moments and memories have been given to us by the BBC. Using their own legendary characters and most famous one liner’s we engaged colleagues in a truly emotive way.

We also created a refreshed Values guide and challenged ourselves to land messages in different places and spaces around their environments, helping them connect with their values in different ways that got them thinking and talking about what they really mean, day in, day out.

PLUSNET - WITH ANTONY COTTON

Plusnet wanted a new approach to its comms, to support a more aggressive press office direction that made the most of its straight-talking position as a value communications provider.

Our strategy was to build an emotional connection with the audience by partnering with relatable people including Coronation Street’s Antony Cotton and Sky Sports pundit, Chris Kamara, while using a mix of humour and informational personal finance stories for a powerful media relations push.

Within our first 12 months of working with Plusnet we increased the brand’s media value by 48% year-on-year.

Plusnet claimed the top spot in YouGov’s Biggest Brand Movers in the UK, making improvements in eight YouGov BrandIndex metrics out of the 13 that are considered.

Plusnet measured rises in YouGov’s four key metrics; Awareness, Ad Awareness, Word Of Mouth Exposure and Buzz, as well as making gains in the brand health metrics - Impression, Reputation and Recommend and the purchase funnel metric Consideration.

11 case studies helped deliver a further 63 pieces of top tier national press coverage.

BT - WINTER WELLBEING

Like most employers, BT Group invests in all aspects of its teams’ wellbeing, with mental health a key focus. On the back of a successful mental health campaign, they wanted to broaden the discussion into other areas of wellbeing.

Winter is often a tough period for many, particularly around mental wellbeing, so the BT team asked us to help them engage teams with  practical info on a range of wellbeing topics to help them through the colder months, before a post-Chrtistmas health push.

We created a ‘Let’s Talk About’ video and podcast series hosted by BT colleagues and featuring interviews with expert guests, offering in depth advice on everything from gut health to anxiety and financial literacy.

The series was supported by a navigable workbook, filled with tips and resources for a healthy festive period, before kicking off the year with ‘The Big Stretch’ global exercise challenge.

We built a campaign that put a fun spin on the classic New Year fitness drive to brush aside the pressure and get everyone moving more. The Workplace-led campaign grabbed colleagues’ attention with a series of fun gifs and memes and calls to action to challenge themselves in support of BT’s charity partners. We also created a Blue Monday Spotify playlist to help everyone get through the year’s (alleged) gloomiest day.

More than 14,000 employees employees watched, liked and commented on the campaign, and over 7,500 of them contributed £30,000 in funds raised for UNICEF and the National Emergencies Trust.

EE - LAUNCHING 5G ON THE INSIDE

EE was preparing to be the first UK telecommunications brand to go to market with faster, smarter 5G technology.

They were adamant their employees would be integral to launch from the outset so approached us to put their people front and centre in their launch.

Our award-winning ‘All About the Gs’ campaign delivered a relentless approach to messaging consistency tied with localisation for launch cities and a full ‘5 Days of 5G’ launch week of activities.

We also created a ground-breaking internal influencer programme, recruiting 25 ‘5G Makers’ to become pro-level content creators. They fanned out across the business to tell the story of 5G, by colleagues, for colleagues.

By reimagining the role employees can play in a campaign, we created a brand-new process, programme and voice in the business. We gave a genuine skills opportunity to colleagues who took part and delivered a masterclass in peer-to-peer communications that won us a CorpComms ‘Best Employee Engagement Programme’ Award, where the judges said our campaign had…

“…re-defined employee engagement.”

We thought so too.

ORANGE - SPONSORSHIP STRATEGY

Our work for the Orange global sponsorship team has included a ‘Games of Change’ campaign that encouraged football fans in Africa to collect and exchange discarded plastic for much-needed grassroots kit, much of which was made from recycled plastic itself; everything from boots and shirts, to nets and pitches. We also created a ‘Future of Sponsorship’ guide that helped teams adapt their approach to sponsorship properties and events during the Covid-19 pandemic, and more importantly, start looking at things from a new perspective for a post-lockdown future.

INTERNET MATTERS

Internet Matters is the UK-based organisation that provides information, guidance and support to help parents and carers keep their children safe online, partnering with some of the world’s largest tech and media companies, including Google, BBC, TikTok, Samsung, BT, EE, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media O2 and Huawei.

The team at Internet Matters wanted to build their media profile and position themselves as the go-to organisation for the safeguarding of children and young people online, while integrating with the PR teams across their partnerships and supporters.

We devised award-winning campaigns, from helping parents navigate issues such as peer pressure on social media, to online porn and cyberbullying, using gold-standard media relations throughout our seven years as the organisation’s retained consultancy.

Appearing regularly across every major news outlet, from the BBC, ITV and Sky News to national broadsheets and parenting and consumer titles, our work generated over 1,800 individual pieces of earned coverage every year.

Our work as the eyes and ears of the organisation and a true extension of its team, propelled Internet Matters, from a standing start, to become the most recognised internet safety organisation in the UK, second only to the NSPCC. 

As a result of the press coverage and reputation building, we helped the organisation secure new partnerships and establish its credibility as a leading authority on children’s internet safety.

MUSIC FOR DEMENTIA

Music for Dementia (M4D) is a national movement for people living with dementia to have access to music as part of their care.

We were briefed to raise the profile of Music for Dementia to encourage the 1 in 4 people in the UK who are affected by dementia in some way – whether it’s themselves or a loved one – to access Music for Dementia’s services.

Rallying the music industry and care sector by hiring BBC Radio 6 Music DJ, Lauren Laverne, as a pro-bono campaign ambassador, we successfully engaged M4D’s key target audience and key opinion leaders.

We secured features on BBC TV flagships The One Show and BBC Breakfast. Our TV coverage even resulted in a single live-on-air donation of £500,000 - for the Paul and Nick Harvey Fund – a charity helping to bring music to people living with dementia across the UK.

THAMES WATER - BRAND ID REFRESH

As Thames Water set about evolving their purpose and strategic messaging, they knew they needed to get some brand basics in order first.

With no detailed guidelines for colleagues to work with, the Thames Water brand team asked us to review and evolve their brand identity system and build a set of definitive visual and verbal guidelines for the business.

Evolving identity means keeping what works and improving what doesn’t. We interviewed all the key stakeholder teams to understand common pain-points and make sure we addressed them in our work, before building their new ID system.

The result was a dramatically improved system with new, fresh elements, including typography, colour palette, iconography, illustration and photography and much clearer guidance across the board in a detailed new brand book. We also created a brand film to support their refreshed brand purpose and mission that set the tone for the whole business during a period of determined change.