Showcasing creativity in the North West

Cloud Nine: Vega Comms

 

Context:

Cloud Nine was founded as a challenger to ghd, but after 15 years growth had plateaued. Awareness was static, brand search was declining and the category was becoming increasingly competitive, with Dyson and Shark bringing significantly larger budgets. Cloud Nine needed a distinctive reason for consumers to choose it — and pay a premium.

Idea:

A disconnect was identified between modern beauty culture and hair-tool marketing. While skincare had embraced health, care and inclusivity, hair styling remained dominated by perfection and damaging high heat.

Cloud Nine’s Revive Mode® technology gave us the answer: effective styling at lower, kinder temperatures. We turned that product truth into a powerful brand idea — Strength Through Kindness — reframing healthy hair as strong hair and giving Cloud Nine an emotionally distinctive position in the category.

Execution:

With just £650k, our challenge was to create disproportionate impact. Rather than spreading investment thinly, we made Channel 4 our solus media partner, securing matched media value and combining fame-building TV with targeted VOD and branded content that ran on social media, supporting the TV activity.

TV delivered scale, while 4Studio’s #GRWM: Roots & Resilience brought the strategy to life through honest stories from women at different life stages, naturally connecting hair health, confidence and self-care.

Impact:

The campaign delivered £1.4m media value, reached 5.2m women aged 35–54, and generated 3.1m #GRWM views. Online sales increased 48% while on air, while spontaneous awareness rose to 24% — ahead of ghd, Dyson and Shark.

Why it matters:

By combining a genuine product advantage with a culturally relevant insight and a focused media partnership, we helped Cloud Nine redefine what strength means in haircare — turning kindness into a powerful platform for brand and commercial growth.

Crown Paints: Notorious Communications

 

The challenge:

Crown Paints’ “Life Stories” creative era was ending, with the new strategy not landing until H2 2026. That left a gap: stay visible through the key decorating period with no new creative assets and a limited budget, or go dark and hand ground to Dulux and newer challengers.

The idea:

Rather than let missing assets limit ambition, we rethought what media could do. Millennial Home Improvers don’t take inspiration from four walls alone — food and travel matter just as much. So we connected those passions to Crown’s ambition to lead the category on colour, turning paint from a functional DIY product into something personal.

The result was “Colour Your Senses with Crown Paints & Good Food”: a first-of-its-kind partnership with Immediate Media fusing food, travel and colour across video, social, digital, print and interactive formats. Good Food’s talent created the content, so we delivered a rich campaign without traditional production costs.

The execution:

• A three-part video series pairing a country, cuisine, colour and room in each episode, run across Good Food’s YouTube (450k+ subscribers) and social
• Three digital advertorials and a content hub linking each colour story to its shade
• An interactive “infinity” skin letting users spin between a Crown colour and a recipe
• Three magazine sponsorships weaving Crown’s palette through the issues

The impact:

• 17.8m impressions, 6.8m video views, 2.3m Millennial Home Improvers reached
• 32% video completion rate, against a 10–20% benchmark
• 2.7m combined print readership, 50% above plan
• Purchase intent up 150%
• Tester pot sales up as much as 150% on hero shades

Why it matters:

Colour becomes more powerful with a story behind it. By turning a creative gap into the campaign’s engine, media stopped being a distribution channel and became the idea itself.

Sofology: TBWA\MCR

 

The challenge:

Make Sofology stand out and stand for something in a sofa retail park of cosy sameness.

They already had gorgeous, well-crafted, beautifully designed sofas. They had a team who were just as quietly carefully discerning as the audience we needed to target. We just needed a rallying point that joined all these things up.

Fussy, it turns out is the strongest F word we needed. Generally seen as a bit of a negative. But for our audience and the Sofology brand it's about high standards, knowing exactly what you want and not settling for anything less. By uncovering this simple human truth about our core customers, we translated this mindset into a strong, distinctive, witty creative idea that gave the brand stand out.

The results:

• 26% sales increase.
• 70% increase in web traffic.
• 5.5★ rating in System1 testing, placing the ad in the top 0.1% of all ads.
• 7% year-on-year growth.
• #1 share of Voice for the first 5 weeks of the campaign, ahead of DFS and IKEA.

Two Minutes of Chat & an Early Screening: Vivid Everywhere

 

Context:

Cancer outcomes are closely linked to early diagnosis, but in Halton, fear, stigma and low awareness were creating barriers to screening. The challenge for Cheshire & Merseyside Cancer Alliance was to reach working-class communities with vital information about cervical, breast and bowel cancer - without producing another clinical health campaign people could easily ignore.

The task was simple but significant: increase awareness, get people talking about cancer and encourage more people to take up screening.

Idea:

Our starting point was an everyday human truth: conversations happen everywhere, but very few are about cancer.

So instead of telling people to “be more aware”, we set out to make cancer easier to talk about.

Two Minutes of Chat & an Early Screening turned a difficult subject into an ordinary conversation, using humour, local pride and familiar faces to remove fear and make early detection feel relevant.

With Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps created and set in Runcorn, we reunited writer Susan Nickson with stars Ralf Little and Will Mellor, alongside real Halton residents, creating conversations that felt unmistakably local, warm and authentic.

Execution:

Seven films formed the heart of an integrated campaign, supported by hyper-local activity designed to appear in the places conversations naturally happen.

Beer mats in pubs, coffee sleeves in cafés, markets, community spaces, Widnes Vikings matchdays and AdVan tours took the message beyond traditional healthcare environments and into everyday life.

Fifty “Campaign in a Box” toolkits gave community ambassadors films, posters and conversation starters to extend the campaign through their own networks.

The language was deliberately simple, direct and inclusive: talk about cancer, understand screening and act early.

Impact:

The campaign generated 1.3m+ impressions, reached 938,167 people and delivered 71,737 engagements.

More importantly, independent evaluation showed genuine behaviour change. 81% of people exposed to the campaign started a conversation about cancer, nearly 50% encouraged a friend or family member to attend screening, and 26% of eligible respondents said they would now book a screening appointment.

Why it matters:

Two Minutes of Chat showed what happens when public health communication feels like the community it is trying to reach.

By replacing clinical language with culture, humour and conversation, creativity didn’t simply generate attention - it helped turn awareness into action.

Yankee Candle: The Behaviours Agency

 

The challenge:

Home fragrance is booming. But Yankee Candle, the global leader in premium fragrance, was fast becoming another forgettable fragrance brand. They were struggling for relevance in fragmented EMEA and APAC markets and facing aggressive price-based competition. They needed to reclaim perception as a premium product by transitioning from simply selling scents to creating a deep emotional connection.

The business appointed The Behaviours Agency and used our Create Fame program to move beyond product features and create a campaign that would generate notoriety, create relevance and ensure the brand showed up distinctly, justifying its premium position.

Our strategy:

We applied our Motivation + Memorability approach to begin the process of audience behaviour change. Our strategy identified motivations across different audiences: the ‘Serenity Seeker’ is motivated by de-stressing, and the ‘Mood Maker’ seeks to create social ambience. We found that both segments value fragrance as an essential ritual to create these scarce and desired moments.

This created the opportunity to position Yankee Candle’s unmatched consistency and room-filling fragrance as unique triggers for these emotional moments. By making Yankee Candle the essential element for these rituals, we created a powerful hook to drive brand fame and emotional resonance.

Creative solution:

Building on the ‘A Fragrance for Every Moment’ platform, we developed a campaign that amplifies the power of fragrance to transform real-life experiences into sensory memories.

Distinctive, hyper-real and serene scenes visualise everyday moments elevated by Yankee Candle. The product acts as the sensory trigger for authentic experiences, connecting with people truly and deeply. Carefully created assets and messaging ensure local market teams can easily and consistently activate the campaign across a busy 12-month marketing plan.