Lucozade

Agency rules prevent me from saying too much, or posting any examples of work, but I'm really proud of what I've done on Lucozade's new campaigns.

The TV ads were released as events, generating a massive buzz. And with everything pointing online, the digital creative team had to pull out all the stops. We nailed it - from the brand site to social media channels, the work's been a hit with the client and the punters.

Take a look at www.lucozade.com to see what we achieved.

Sky Highlights

Sky Highlights is the weekly e-newsletter that goes out to all 3 million Sky TV customers in the UK and Republic of Ireland. It's their most-seen piece of communication - and since November 2010, I've been responsible for the words.

In keeping with the Sky brand, it's conversational and content-focussed. Recently, the main thrust has been to push Sky Atlantic, a new channel bringing the best US drama to a UK audience. But my copy's covered everything from Louie Spence's dance studio to Melvyn Bragg's arts show. It's a broad church alright.

The newsletter is produced by integrated agency Digital and Direct. I'll post an example as soon as I'm able, but chances are there's one lurking in an inbox near you...

Sky - interactive 'A Fairytale Deal' digital assets

I worked with an art director at Digital and Direct to create various digital assets for Sky's 'A Fairytale Deal' campaign. These included interactive banners, Facebook ASUs - which had huge click-through rates - and email shots.

The campaign was based on the ATL thinking, which repurposed classic fairytales to ship Sky's products in an entertaining, chatty way. We used the Frog Prince to get across the idea that one kiss (or click) would turn your rubbish broadband package into a properly blue-blooded internet and TV bundle.

I'd love to post an examples of the interactive banners - but no can do right now (agency rules...). The important thing is that the digital campaign as a whole drove people to sign up to Sky's products in greater numbers.

Game and Sky - email optimisation

It's not glamorous, but optimising emails delivers demonstrable improvements to open rates and click-throughs. It's a great skill for a copywriter to have.

The best example I can give is from work I did as part of a Digital and Direct pitch to Game, the UK's leading specialist console game retailer. Their emails were in need of some TLC. I used my experience of producing high-volume, effective email campaigns to introduce a 'best practice' guide, covering:

• A personalised subject line
• Preloader copy for smart phones
• Getting a strong headline into email client preview panes
• Positioning the offer so it always sits above the fold
• Personalised body copy
• Integrated social media
• Introducing live text and alt text in case the reader has email images turned off
• Making sure every section presents a clickable call-to-action

We won the pitch - and I'll post the creative when it goes live.

I've also been part of the team responsible for developing new email templates for Sky - whatever message they want to convey, it'll hit your inbox in a pristine, perfectly crafted layout if nothing else.

Feature: review of Spooks, episode 5

Written for TV blog Watch With Mothers on 19/10/2010. It's the third review of a series that's been commissioned to run for the rest of season nine. Read the previous entry here.

Israel. Palestine.

Spooks.

It’s a dramatic intifada waiting to happen…

PartyPoker.com: interactive banner featuring Francesco Totti

When PartyPoker.com launched into the Italian market as PartyPoker.it, football superstar Francesco Totti signed up as brand ambassador.

I worked on all aspects of the launch campaign featuring il Pupone, but the piece that stands out is this interactive banner. You can play a game of headers with Totti, seeing how many times you can keep the ball in the air by clicking your mouse. I was one half of the creative team which created and pitched the initial concept, and scripted the video shoot and developed the final banner.

It's a really fun way to get prospective players interacting with the brand, especially in a country as fanatical about football as Italy. This was reflected in the response: it is still PartyPoker.com's most-clicked banner ad, and helped the Totti campaign increase the brand's Italian market share by 300%.

To play the game for yourself, download and open the Totti banner .zip file here. It contains everything you'll need to launch the banner - just double-click the file called tottibanner.html to join the great man himself.

PartyPoker.com print work: The Scandinavian Masters

I worked on a series of print ads promoting The Scandinavian Masters, a PartyPoker.com poker tournament exclusively for Nordic players. These ran in the Scandinavian poker press to both attract new players to the site and to support the online marketing campaign aimed at existing players.

To make localisation easy, we decided to play up the friendly regional rivalry between Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and Finns - substitute the nationalities mentioned in the ads below for whichever ones suit you best.

This approach was so successful that the campaign was adapted for The Irish Masters, with the English on the receiving end of a little gentle abuse...

Here's a strong example of the creative direction we took:

View it full-size here.

Take a look at some more of the executions below the fold.