Showcasing creativity in the South West and Wales

It's a real pleasure to introduce this Creative Showcase celebrating the outstanding work coming from agencies across the South West and Wales. Ours is a region rich in creative talent, entrepreneurial spirit and ambitious thinking. From independent agencies to established names, the work featured here demonstrates how strategic insight, bold creativity and effective execution come together to solve real business challenges and deliver measurable results.

The campaigns span a diverse range of sectors and clients, but they all have one thing in common: they show the power of creativity to make a meaningful commercial impact.

Whether building brands for the long term, driving behaviour change or helping ambitious businesses grow, this collection is a brilliant reflection of the quality of work our agencies are producing every day.

I'm incredibly proud to showcase just a small selection of the talent from across the South West and Wales. I hope you enjoy exploring the case studies as much as I have.

BMW: krow kinetic

 

The Challenge:

BMW Group faced a growing talent shortage across its franchised retailer network. Following COVID, Brexit and the rapid growth of electric vehicles, skilled automotive vacancies had doubled to 30,000 across the industry.

The challenge extended far beyond recruiting technicians. Retailers also needed Sales Executives, Service Advisors, MINI Experts and Motorrad Technicians, while competing manufacturers were chasing the same limited talent pool.

BMW Group also had little control over salaries, benefits or workplace culture because employees were hired by independent retailers. The campaign therefore needed to make automotive retail itself more desirable, reaching both experienced professionals and people who had never considered a career in the sector.

The Idea:

The ‘Future Revolves Around You’ transformed recruitment from a functional job advertisement into an emotional talent-acquisition platform.

The idea connected childhood passions with future careers, showing how an early fascination with cars and motorcycles could evolve into a rewarding role with BMW or MINI.

By positioning automotive retail as a career of choice rather than compromise, the campaign aimed to reignite the ambitions of existing professionals while inspiring an entirely new generation of applicants.

The Execution:

Eleven creative executions were developed across roles including Technicians, Service Advisors, Sales Executives, MINI Experts and Motorrad Technicians.

The media strategy combined trusted automotive trade titles with more unexpected channels. Sky AdSmart targeted motoring enthusiasts in their homes, timed around major motorsport programming. Mobile geofencing focused activity around retailer locations with the greatest recruitment demand, while high-impact London Underground placements generated visibility among employees, customers and potential advocates.

Social and digital activity drove candidates to the central BMW Retail Careers website, supported by an employee advocacy campaign and a retailer toolkit enabling dealerships to run their own local recruitment activity.

The Results:

The campaign delivered:

• 4,200 attributable job applications
• 96% uplift in completed applications
• 61% increase in website traffic year on year
• 4.5% overall click-through rate

Its success also earned multiple DMA, Marketing Week and Automotive Marketing & Communications awards.

Brittany Ferries: McCANN Bristol

The challenge:

Brittany Ferries competes with – and is outspent by – package airlines targeting UK holidaymakers travelling to France, Ireland and Spain. The task was to challenge their unfair perception of Brittany Ferries as merely a transport provider (a ‘water taxi’) and reframe the brand, authentically, as a holiday provider. The opportunity was to position the brand as curators and guides to the regions, and celebrate the freedom of travelling with your car, your pet, your bikes – and the rare kind of freedom this brings to a holiday.

The idea:

A beautifully crafted print campaign - targeting readers of The Guardian and The Observer - who over-index as the brand’s sweet-spot audience of ‘modern explorers’, more open to a different kind of holiday. They are also avid readers, so the idea was to leverage the power of long copy to transport them to a better place and immerse them in the scenic, sensory and spectacular experiences to be discovered in Western Europe.

The execution:

The print executions combine insightful and evocative copywriting with beautifully disruptive typography to engage readers and carry them along on a ‘sea’ of imagery that brings to vivid life these unique destinations and experiences. By crafting the copy into typographical waves, the campaign had an instant visual impact on the page that hooks readers into the personal stories that unfold. It’s a refreshing and distinctive way to land the proposition ‘uncommon holidays’, while shifting perceptions of the brand.

The impact:

The summer-long campaign met all delivered a marked shift in brand effectiveness metrics. Recall (awareness) was +48% above benchmark, recommendations spiked +74% and organic bookings increased by +54% in the campaign period. The campaign has won multiple international advertising awards at the Sharks, Creative Circle and Travel Marketing awards. And Campaign named it in their Top Three ‘Best Press Ads of the Year’. Proving that ‘old school’ craft can still make waves.

Butcombe: Bray Leino

The challenge

After 47 years as a Bristol favourite, Butcombe Original was launching in cans for the first time. For a heritage beer, a new format can raise questions. The challenge wasn't to reinvent the brand, but to reassure loyal drinkers that nothing had changed except the packaging, while driving sales with a modest regional budget.

The idea

Rather than making the launch feel like a product innovation, we celebrated it as a milestone in the brand's story. Using bold, witty headlines such as 'AFTER 47 YEARS WE'VE FINALLY PUT A RING ON IT' and 'NO IFS OR BUTS', we created simple, memorable creative that inspired confidence rather than explanation. The Butcombe 'B' was embedded directly into the campaign, turning the brand itself into a distinctive creative asset.

The execution

The campaign focused entirely on Bristol, Butcombe's home city, reinforcing the brand's authenticity where it mattered most. Two creative executions ran across 13 digital out-of-home sites, spanning roadside, rail and premium landscape formats, with messaging designed to make an impact in just a few seconds. The activity was supported by geo-targeted social media around key retail locations to maximise visibility and drive shoppers into nearby Tesco stores.

The results

Booked to deliver 1.54 million impacts, the campaign generated 1.83 million, exceeding forecasts by 18.6%, with the flagship Bristol Lights site delivering an 80% uplift. Beyond media performance, the campaign helped drive rate of sale in Tesco and contributed to Butcombe securing its largest supermarket listing to date, reaching around 200 stores. A simple idea, executed with confidence, proved that great creative doesn't need a big budget to deliver commercial impact.

Scottish Friendly: Join the Dots

The challenge:

Scottish Friendly is a Scottish mutual offering ISAs and life assurance. They had ambitious growth targets for their award-winning ISA products in a competitive market. Although they are a UK-wide brand, they were historically stronger across Scotland and the North West, so this brief was all about combining brand awareness and activation channels to maximise the potential in those 2 regions.

The thinking:

The Join the Dots approach always starts with a client’s data. We profiled Scottish Friendly’s first party data to understand who they were demographically, which media channels they consumed and what things motivated them to save. This helped us segment the audience by their emotional needs when it came to savings which in turn informed media placements. We then used behavioural analytics to create a door drop model identifying postcode sectors where people lived who had the greatest propensity to respond - people who were going to choose Scottish Friendly specifically over and above another financial brand.

The execution:

The campaign comprised broad coverage of the core audience delivered by radio, underpinned with OOH in the key postcode sectors from the behavioural door drop model. Prospective consumers in the postcode sectors were then driven down through the conversion funnel with cost-efficient door drop packs and paid media to harvest demand. We set up tracking to help us measure the YoY % uplift in sales in areas with multi-channel advertising compared to areas without.

The impact:

The YoY uplift in sales in areas with multichannel activity was 180% higher than in areas without. As a result, Scottish Friendly exceeded their sales targets across the year, despite challenging market conditions. The multichannel campaign was then rolled out across new sales territories.

Siniat: Factor Three

 

The challenge:

Siniat is not the largest player in the UK drywall construction industry; that title has been dominated by another brand for generations. Siniat identified there was a perception across the industry of complacency from the competition and looked to capitalise on this opportunity by boosting its brand presence and highlighting its credentials as a credible challenger to the market leader – with the purpose of ‘taking the crown’.

The idea:

An effective brand campaign needs to create emotional appeal above and beyond a rational product story – where differentiation is much harder to achieve. Going product-to-product with the market leader was never going to gather any lasting traction across the audiences identified. Instead, we looked to establish a bold challenger-brand campaign distinct in the market, featuring and celebrating the varied audience groups who already choose and prefer Siniat's added-value offer.

Our job was to disrupt, to show the audience in a different light, and to make some noise in the construction industry. We generated in-depth audience personas, crafting a messaging hierarchy tailored to each audience. The Purple Reign story was created to directly challenge entrenched buying behaviours, boldly positioning Siniat as the emerging and highly credible alternative to the market leader.

The outcome:

A confident and striking external campaign was underpinned by an internal campaign: informing and motivating Siniat’s passionate workforce, getting them behind this bold approach of recognising and celebrating customers at each stage of the influence and purchasing process.

The launch campaign saw impressions increase by 339.4%, with comments rising by 197.5%; x59 ROI; 12.4 million reach; A 7.3% increase in project value and was named the Best Internal Comms Campaign at the 2025 CMA Awards.

Thatchers: Bray Leino

 

The challenge:

How do you turn a much-loved regional cider maker into the UK's number one off-trade cider brand? When Bray Leino began working with Thatchers over 15 years ago, the Somerset family business was producing exceptional cider but remained a relatively small regional brand. The challenge wasn't simply to advertise the product, but to build a brand capable of growing sustainably for generations while staying true to its family values and heritage.

The idea:

Rather than chasing short-term campaigns, we helped create a long-term creative platform inspired by the thing that makes Thatchers unique: farming. Treating the brands as carefully as the Orchards themselves. Instead of continually reinventing the brand, we nurtured and strengthened its most distinctive assets over time, allowing creativity to compound year after year.

The execution:

Across multiple campaigns we cultivated an enduring world around Thatchers, featuring Myrtle Farm, the Thatcher family, tasting time, the iconic barn doors and, more recently, the award-winning Aardman-created 'Pint-Sized Perfection' campaign. The platform has evolved across TV, digital, sponsorship, experiential activity and product launches, with every execution reinforcing the same distinctive brand story while helping support innovation, premium positioning and commercial growth.

The results:

The long-term approach has transformed the business. Since the partnership began, Thatchers has grown from selling around 15 million litres of cider each year to more than 100 million litres.

Today, Thatchers is the UK's number one off-trade cider brand. It's a powerful example of how patient, consistent creativity, like good farming, delivers its richest harvest over time.

Transport for Wales: Golley Slater

 

The challenge:

Transport for Wales' (TfW) vision is to be ‘Wales’ favourite way to travel’ and their purpose is to help people to travel in ways that are good for the planet, good for the pocket, and good for real life. TfW briefed Golley Slater to build this brand positioning into a distinctive, emotionally resonant creative platform, that breaks category conventions, to stretch across travel modes, messages and campaigns, for the long-term. The creative platform needed to create brand fame, build cultural relevance and be capable of inspiring behavioural change. Our objectives were to 1) Change public perceptions by highlighting the benefits of public transport and focusing on customer experience. 2) Increase brand preference to increase consideration 3) Encourage adoption and regular usage to build customer numbers. 4) Make a cultural shift to position public transport as the natural and preferred choice.

The thinking:

Our single-minded approach was to demonstrate how TfW is deeply embedded in everyday life and identity in Wales (and the borders). From big towns and cities to small remote villages. Showing up when it matters and doing everything we can, to get people to the places that matter most. From the everyday, the epic and the emotional, TfW is always there – ‘Woven through Wales’.

The activation:

Golley Slater brought ‘Woven through Wales’ to life through a signature visual world, where knitted hills, patchwork valleys and woven landscapes sit alongside crisp, photo-real trains, creating a handcrafted yet contemporary take on Welsh life, designed to flex across all channels. A series of knitted characters make everyday journeys through the woven world (built with models, VFX and A.I.), their authentic stories supported by a distinctly Welsh backdrop (and a male voice choir). Paid media included TV, VOD, OOH, cinema, radio, social, a large mural in Cardiff, and sponsorship idents.

The impact:

‘Woven through Wales’ helped deliver measurable impact on brand and sales performance and was positively received by TfW customers, staff and stakeholders:

• System 1 creative testing achieved a score of 4.6/5
• Brand tracking audiences rated the campaign highly (4–5) for memorability, standout, and its ability to position TfW as a modern, forward-looking brand.
• 31.7 million train journeys, up nearly a fifth year-on-year.
• Rail revenues up 17.8% to £174.8 million.

Welsh Athletics: Orchard

 

The challenge: 

How do you tackle an issue that stops thousands of women from doing something they love?

That was the challenge Welsh Athletics brought to Orchard. Research showed that 72% of women change their running habits during the darker months (This Girl Can), while 93% of women have experienced sexual harassment while running outdoors (Our Streets Now). We set out to create a behaviour change campaign that could start a movement.

The strategy:

The campaign had two audiences: women who already run, giving them the confidence and support to keep running throughout the winter, and the wider public, encouraging everyone to think about the role they can play in helping women feel safer after dark. That thinking became Own The Night, underpinned by the call to action Be The Light.

Orchard developed the campaign strategy, messaging, visual identity and creative direction before producing a hero film. Around it, we created a content ecosystem of short-form films covering practical topics such as safety technology and night running essentials. Paid media across Meta, TikTok and YouTube built awareness while driving registrations for three flagship Own The Night runs across Wales. We also developed stakeholder toolkits, enabling running clubs, police forces and community organisations to activate the campaign locally.

The results:

Following a launch event at the Senedd, the campaign culminated in three sold-out flagship runs on 26 October 2025. In just four weeks, it reached nearly two million people across Wales, generated more than 40 pieces of media coverage, including a prime-time feature on ITV Wales. Paid media delivered over one million impressions, 13,000 clicks and helped sell out all three flagship events.

The campaign raised awareness of an important issue, gave women the confidence to keep running through the winter months, and encouraged communities across Wales to play their part in helping women feel safer after dark.

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