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.

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.

PartyPoker.com: 'Everyone's Playing' brand assets

PartyPoker.com has been through several rebrands, and I've edited and written copy for the vast majority of them. The 'Everyone's Playing' identity was one of my favourites. It's simple, punchy and communicated the brand's core value of accessibility at a glance. Plus it reads well and looks nice to boot...

Here are a few examples of the assets we produced to run as print ads, static digital banners and landing pages.

View it full-size here.

More below the fold: the copy is the same throughout, tying the different visual themes together across the campaign.

PartyCasino.com: Circus direct mail

This piece of direct mail was produced to promote an innovative new casino game called Circus. The piece is the shape of a big top, and opens out to introduce all the exciting new features the PartyGaming games studio came up with. I really like it as a piece of DM, as it makes real use of the product's selling points in both copy and design to successfully hook the reader. As a result, it generated a higher response rate than any of PartyCasino.com's other DM campaigns - and helped make Circus one of the site's most profitable games into the bargain.

The spreads linked to below show the front/back panel and the main interior panels of the mailer. Click the links below to see full-size images:

1. Front and back panels
2. Inside panels

PartyBets.com: 'Tabloid' campaign

This is a selection from a series of print ads which were written to promote football betting opportunities at PartyBets.com to UK tabloid readers.

The brief was to take the best features of the tabs' backpage headlines (the sporting wordplay) to sum up a featured bet each week. Whenever one these ads was run in the Sun or the Mirror, the brand's revenue showed a direct increase.

This is my super soaraway favourite:

View it full-size here.

These ads also ran as digital banners, following the same creative route over three frames. For example:

Frame 1: Good Kop, bad Kop?
Frame 2: Gerrard to score first and Liverpool to win 2-1, 30/1
Frame 3: Interested?

Take a look at a couple more that hit the back of the net below the fold...

PartyBingo.com print campaign

When PartyGaming's bingo room relaunched with the strapline 'What Women Want', I was part of the team responsible for coming up with some cheeky, friendly ad concepts that could also work through the line.

I've chosen my three favourite print executions and posted them below. You can check out a digital execution here.

View it full-size here.

Two more beauties live a click away...

PartyBingo.com digital banners

When PartyGaming's bingo room relaunched with the strapline 'What Women Want', I was part of the team responsible for coming up with some cheeky, friendly ad concepts that could also work through the line.

I've chosen my favourite digital execution and posted it below. You can check out the print executions here.

PartyMarkets.com acquisition banner

I was part of the team that worked on the launch of PartyMarkets.com, PartyGaming's financial trading platform. As the brand was aimed at new traders, we took decided to take the creative work in a clean, welcoming direction.

This digital banner ad was part of the through-the-line launch campaign which also featured an email campaign and a print brochure inserted into daily financial newspaper City AM. All the assets emphasised that PartyMarkets.com made accessing the financial markets straight-forward and affordable - while still satisfying the stringent FSA regulations around marketing.

PartyMarkets.com email campaign

When PartyGaming launched its financial trading platform PartyMarkets.com, I was given the job of writing an acquisition and conversion email campaign to attract new real-money traders.

It was a tough brief: the audience of extremely savvy traders was a hard-sell and the FSA's strict restrictions on marketing messages meant I had an extremely tight space to work in. But by making sure I communicated the brand values of trustworthiness and simplicity, I produced a strong set of emails which brought lots of new punters to the product.

The launch campaign also featured digital banners and a print brochure inserted into daily financial newspaper City AM.

Here's a taste of the campaign.

Acquisition mailer 1

More examples live below the fold.