PizzaExpress has signed with advertising, media and music specialist Truant London as its agency of record, following a competitive pitch. Truant was appointed as lead agency after impressing PizzaExpress’ marketing team, led by new Chief Customer Officer Shadi Halliwell (formerly O2’s Head of Brand and Harvey Nichols’ Group Marketing and Creative Director), with a strategy that gives the brand bags of attitude to broaden and re-energise the restaurant giant’s appeal. The partnership sees Truant set a fresh direction for PizzaExpress by developing a fun and youthful new tone that celebrates the vibrancy of all-things-pizza across the brand’s extensive pizzeria estate, alongside a multimedia campaign spanning owned, social, OOH, connected TV, digital and online. The debut campaign launches on 21 June 2021 with explosive art direction to hero PizzaExpress’ new menu, encouraging younger and family audiences to reappraise the brand while amplifying the restaurant’s innovation strategy.
Sipsmith celebrates its first year as the Official Gin Partner of The Championships, Wimbledon with a new piece of creative, where Mr Swan returns to our screens with his Centre Court debut. In this second campaign created again in collaboration with Ogilvy, Sipsmith’s loveable stop-motion character Mr Swan, mistakenly announces, with boundless enthusiasm that ‘Wimbledon is The Official Tennis of Sipsmith Gin’. Sipsmith’s Wimbledon campaign will be served in a variety of TV formats (60s, 30s and 4x10s), launching on June 21st, a week before The Championships, Wimbledon goes live, on TV and VOD. A suite of social assets with Mr Swan commenting on traditions went live from June 14th and will be released throughout the event.
Launching across Pink News (digital display), Metro London (cover-wrap), Facebook and Instagram Stories ‘Serious Worrying Incidents’ is an integrated campaign, created by VCCP, VCCP CX and Wavemaker. An evocative campaign, it aims to encourage the public to take an active stance against hate crime across the TfL network and is part of a larger campaign that will look to tackle all incidents on the transport network, including staff abuse and drunken aggression. The ambition of the campaign is to create real societal change which can only be achieved through collective action amongst customers and staff. ‘TfL stands against Hate’ seeks to provoke a collective and proactive response amongst commuters. TfL is delivering a rallying call to all passengers to raise their hands in support of tackling hate crimes across London’s transport network and encouraging customers to proactively report instances of these crimes.
BT’s Enterprise business is launching a new creative platform for its SME activity, “All Business. No Drama”, with a major multichannel campaign to promote the new BT Halo for business. The communications platform and campaign were developed in partnership with NOW. The new platform will inform all future communications for the B2B brand, aiming to demonstrate that BT’s business products offer the most reliable connectivity and coverage in the UK, and to establish the brand as the perfect partner for SMEs. The first campaign featuring the new positioning shows how BT understands the realities of business life and the frustrations that can hold business owners back, engineering solutions that strip those frustrations away, so that they can focus on the important things.
Just Eat Takeaway is working with Byte, the Dept-owned martech agency, to create UK and worldwide digital campaigns to support its global sponsorship of the UEFA EURO 2020TM football tournament. Launching in June 2021 and capitalising on key moments throughout the tournament, such as the England v Scotland game on Friday 18 June, the campaign is a combination of entertaining celebrity-laden videos, stills and dynamic creative across all major social platforms. Tapping into the tournament’s intense feelings of anticipation and pent-up demand for socialising, the UK campaign features Eric Cantona delivering rousing, tongue-in-cheek rallying speeches to get the nation hyped in the lead up to big matches. Tailored executions will be shown when excitement around a particular game starts to peak. A template-based creative approach saw specific content for each market created, themed around ‘local hero’ celebrities and key match dates for different countries. The global campaign features multiple A-lister footballers including Gianluigi Buffon, Luka Podolski and Fernando Torres, with the stars helping to amplify content that counts down to the crucial games and their pre-match takeaway ordering window.
Experience design company, Imagination, has received an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games. The support will allow Imagination to fully embrace groundbreaking virtual production techniques using Unreal Engine, and help brands deliver Hollywood-quality visual effects and techniques to the masses. As a demonstration of its virtual production and brand storytelling capabilities, Imagination has created a cinema-quality teaser featuring the new Trident 660 from Triumph Motorcycles as an example. Viewers follow the story of a female protagonist Phoenix Jaxson—played by alt-pop artist July Jones—as she solves crime and delivers justice in a dystopian world. The video highlights the creative possibilities of virtual production by taking the audience on an action-packed journey through photorealistic urban environments, spanning day to night, which finally breaks the fourth wall by revealing the set and film crew behind the production.
To celebrate an incredible season of sport, Mitchell & Brown has launched its ‘Summer of Sport’ competition, where three lucky customers can score big by winning back the cost of their TV. Bolton-based Mitchell & Brown is inviting customers that purchase one of its TVs between 1st June to 31st August 2021 to enter into the free prize draw. With a wide range of stockists across the UK, customers can take part in this exciting initiative by asking at their local retailer or purchasing any Mitchell & Brown TV online and then registering the purchase at www.mitchellandbrown.co.uk/competition.
