The Government

In mid 2020, I had been asked by Mullen Lowe to write the new recruitment campaign for the NHS.

Soon after I started work on this, Tom Knox, the agency Chairman, called me one evening.

As the agency of record for the NHS, Mullen Lowe were being handed all Covid communications briefs by the Government.

The agency was becoming overwhelmed and so Tom asked me if, in addition to writing the new NHS campaign, I would oversee this work.

The following morning I presented myself at the Cabinet Office in Whitehall which was to become my office for the following five months.

At this time, there was a feeling in the country that a lot of the Government communication around the pandemic had been less than clear and I was determined that the work going forward would communicate as simply and clearly as possible.

In my time helping Mullen Lowe, I oversaw two major campaigns – the launch of the NHS App and ‘Hands, Face, Space’.

Everyone you love

One of the most important of the Government Covid communications projects was the launch of the NHS Covid-19 App.

The App provided people with helpful information on testing, symptoms and contact tracing and critical information on the risk of infection in their home postcode and in their immediate geography as they moved about as well as acting as a passport to entry to venues such as pubs and restaurants.

An enormous amount of research was carried out in order to arrive at the most compelling strategy for the launch of the App but, unsurprisingly, the most motivating factor for the majority of people was to protect their loved ones.

As we went to creative development, I asked the senior creative team Jane Briers and Dave Cornmell to work on the brief.

Jane and Dave produced a number of ideas but there was a real simplicity in the thought that just as the people you love are all on your phone so now is the App that helps protect them.

We talked to a number of directors about the idea and were won over by Simon Ratigan’s insistence that the whole thing had to be shot authentically with real people cast off the street.

The Government’s download target for the NHS Covid-19 App was 40% of all 16+ smartphone users in England and Wales.

This was the critical mass that needed to be reached for the app to have real effect in helping curb spread of the virus.

The app launched on September 24th, 2020.

As of January 2021, it had been downloaded a massive 21,527,44 times.

This represented 56% of all 16+ smartphone users in England and Wales and was over double the amount of downloads achieved by any other European country.

The NHS Covid-19 App was the second most downloaded free iphone app in the UK in 2020, ahead of TikTok, WhatsApp and Houseparty and behind only Zoom.

Uptake of the NHS Covid-19 App was regarded as a huge success by the government.

TO PROTECT

One day whilst working at the Cabinet Office the account team came to see me.

They told me the government had arrived at a new piece of language that represented the key elements of social distancing.

A few days later, a couple of hundred civil servants seethed as Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced this language to the nation with what they saw as inappropriate levity.

Our job, very simply, was to make sure everyone understood what was meant by ‘Hands, Face, Space’.

David Parker and Laila Milborrow were given the assignment and wrote this didactic but powerful 30 second ad which was sensitively directed by Max Forsythe.

Hard data on effectiveness of the campaign is hard to achieve but government research found that 7 in every 8 people in England and Wales had understood these critical preventative measures.