Showcasing Northern Ireland

Many of the campaigns we produce will not have exposure outside of Northern Ireland, and so it’s fantastic we have this opportunity to share them and to shine a light on the great work we produce here. We hope you enjoy them.

Danske Bank Switch: krow Ireland

 

Brief:

“Don’t be subtle”. This was krow’s first brief for new client Danske Bank, who had traditionally been a conservative library smiley image type advertiser. So we needed cut-through, based upon this insight: People are reluctant to move banks with misperceived hassle being the main barrier.

Challenge:

How could we attract customers and reverse the trend of their moving from traditional high street banks to new national and global banks; by overcoming customer inertia.

Solution:

krow delivered three executions tackling the barrier to change by showing how you could fill out your application in the time it would take to complete an everyday activity such as running a bath, enjoying a coffee or looking for something to watch on your streaming choice of preference. Each time we included a not very subtle incentive to earn £200 if you made the switch.

Effectiveness:

In the first week of launch, Danske were flooded with applications, so many that they had to call in teams for round-the-clock response volume processing the responses.

Every KPI metric smashed by 150-200% - and a great start to a new relationship. Great news for everyone, well maybe not the extra Danske Bank teams working 24/7 to hit account opening deadlines. Ah well, that’s effectiveness for you.

Dept for Infrastructure: Genesis

 

We partnered with the Department for Infrastructure to try to help make all road-users a little more vigilant and empathetic – whether they were driving, cycling or walking.

The Challenge:

The Dept for Infrastructure, which is responsible for NI’s roads, wanted more people to cycle. But there were several barriers to this happening, including perceptions of safety and drivers’ negative attitudes towards cyclists. Together, we developed a campaign to address this.

Our Approach:

Our research showed an urgent need to ‘humanise’ road-users in each other’s eyes.

The campaign had to be a reminder that there are real people near you on the road, sometimes just inches away, and their safety often depends on you. Our AV execution highlighted potential flashpoints between road-users, then used a clever CGI transition to bring both parties together to talk it out.  The radio executions aimed to make drivers and cyclists reassess their relationship on the road, and we used creative audio techniques to play with the listener's sense of distance and space to highlight how important it is to look out for cyclists when you’re driving. For OOH, print and digital, we focused on a more tactical message. Using the characters from the TV ad, we demonstrated a key safety practice, showing the recommended 1.5m gap that should be kept between cars and bikes.

Results:

The campaign ran across NI TV, OOH, radio, digital, press and more.  Independent research reported that 85% of drivers surveyed said the campaign persuaded them to drive in a more considerate way towards cyclists. Meanwhile, 79% of cyclists said it influenced them to cycle more safely. And to top it off, one of the campaign’s radio ads won silver at the prestigious Drum Roses Awards and the campaign was awarded multiple Publicity Association of NI awards.

DoH/HSCNI Adopting and Fostering: ASG

 

In late 2021, HSC NI Adoption & Foster Care engaged ASG to address an urgent shortfall of foster families for more than 150 unaccompanied refugee minors [predominantly from Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan] forecast to be arriving in Northern Ireland from September 2022 because of new UK regulatory requirements for resettling asylum-seeking teens and young people across all home nations.

ASG formed a cross-disciplinary team to work in partnership with he client working group—comprising strategic planners, creative and design leads, media planners, production specialists, and account managers—to develop “Give Hope a Home,” a three-month emergency appeal with a £160k budget, delivered March-May 2022.

Leveraging proprietary segmentation tools and EMBRACE NI insights, the data and research subgroup identified six high-propensity cohorts—ranging from single females over 30 to migrant professionals—and conducted interviews with refugee youths to learn that authentic personal narratives and clear practical guidance would drive empathy and applications.

Creative leads commissioned a local poet to script ‘Ali’s’ first-person poem, which was rendered via hand-sketched illustrations, an authentic voiceover and layered sound engineering. The media planning unit deployed the media budget across key platforms that included targeted Google Ads, social channels, digital video, and A3 workplace posters, while the broadcast team secured Video-on-Demand spots on ITV Hub and mid-weight radio buys on stations like Cool FM and Downtown, totalling 8.46 million search impressions, 7.2 million social impressions, and 10.79 million OOH contacts.

Production and QA teams ensured all assets met WCAG 2.1 AA standards, while the analytics team maintained Tableau dashboards for weekly “Insight Pulse” reviews.

When widespread attention to the Ukraine conflict in March 2022 risked conflating the appeal with Ukrainian-only refugees, the ASG team convened stakeholders within 48 hours to revise and crystallise all messaging—adding explicit language and bilingual assets to clarify that “Give Hope a Home” would primarily support non-Ukrainian minors.

By July 2022, the appeal generated 528 enquiries—up from an eight-year historic baseline of 36—resulting in 227 screenings and 43 approved foster carers, a 3,244 percent increase. This collaborative effort demonstrated ASG’s integrated strategic, creative, and media expertise, achieving profound social impact under tight timelines.

Ending The Harm: Ardmore Group

 

The Challenge:

“Police have warned entire streets in Northern Ireland are in debt to paramilitary gangs running money-lending operations.” BBC, 15 June 2021

Following The Troubles in Northern Ireland, many paramilitaries never stood down and instead transitioned to become organised criminal gangs. Despite often being seen as protectors, paramilitary gangs use illegal money lending to exploit their communities. The challenge was to transform the normalisation of paramilitary financial control into rejection in the communities.

Insight:

People experiencing financial hardship, and without access to credit, borrow from paramilitary lenders for everyday things, such as food shopping. But once an individual borrows, they enter a viscous spiral of horrific rates of interest, diminishing time to pay, intimidation, fear, shame and desperation. The campaign had to tackle the challenge head on by pursuing a belief shift from, “They’re doing me a favour”, to the dark truth, “Paramilitaries are not interested in helping me. They want to exploit me and hold me forever in their debt.”

Creative Solution:

Our ‘Deadline’ campaign tells the story of a young single mum, struggling to even put milk in the fridge. It exposes the frightening escalation of how her life deteriorates rapidly into fear and isolation after she borrows from an illegal lender.

The potency of the idea was tested using System1’s Ad Test – demonstrating that ‘Deadline’ deeply affected the audience, with intense reactions of sadness, anger and disgust, with a 3.5x higher emotion score than the UK norm.

The film’s sound design accentuates the escalation of the situation, continually building the sense of pressure, fear and isolation, punctuated throughout by a ticking clock and repeating alarm.

Outcomes:

Independent research of the 9 most economically deprived areas of NI showed that:

• Significantly more people understood the consequences of borrowing from illegal lenders compared to a benchmark carried out before the campaign.
• 90% agreed paramilitary lenders hold them forever in their debt.
• 87% agreed the campaign would put them off borrowing from paramilitary gang.

Just Call CRASH: Navigator Blue

 

Distinctive Creativity Driving Effectiveness

CRASH Services needed to overcome one of the toughest challenges in brand communication: shifting behaviour in a category that the public barely recognise.

Accident management isn’t something that is top of mind for most people (unlike insurance which is mandatory) and, even when they do need it, they’re often confused about what exactly it is.

Most people’s instinctive response after a car accident is to call someone they rely on and trust - a partner, parent, or friend - rarely an accident management company. Our objective was to rewire that instinct into one simple, memorable behaviour: “Don’t bother your [other-half / mum / mate]. Just call CRASH.”

The Creative Approach:

To land that message with cut-through and memorability, we created a suite of distinctive character-led TVCs.

Each scenario places a protagonist at the scene of an accident, set against Northern Ireland landmarks. But rather than film on location, we combined live-action characters with hand-drawn pencil illustrations of their surroundings. This gives the work a striking, ownable visual style while keeping production agile and cost-effective.

When our character begins a phone conversation we shift to split-screen. However, only one actor’s voice is ever heard: the anxious protagonist speaks for themselves but also imitates the calm, relaxed tone of the person they are calling. The result is a humorous juxtaposition - frantic anxiety on one side of the screen, cool reassurance on the other.

The dialogue is fast-paced and delivered in a range of local NI accents, amplifying both humour and authenticity. Across executions, we varied the personas and respondents to broaden audience relatability.

Why It Works:

This approach fuses behavioural insight with creativity.

The use of a fluent device - the repeatable structure of distinctive character, background style and vocal delivery - ensures recall. The humour creates a positive, memorable connection with the audience and cuts through category indifference. Most importantly, the campaign embeds a simple, actionable memory structure - in that moment of crisis, “just call CRASH”.

It’s a clear demonstration of how creativity, executed with distinctiveness and discipline, can transform instinctive behaviour and build brand effectiveness.

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