Words
that work.

Together Against RSV

Getting a frightened parent to the right care, without frightening them.

RSV affects 90% of children by the age of two (around two million children in the UK) and puts roughly 30,000 under-fives in hospital every year. Most cases clear up on their own. A few turn into bronchiolitis or pneumonia. The whole problem of the campaign sat in that gap: how does a parent at 2am tell the difference?

The research said they mostly can't. Nearly half of parents surveyed (46%) found the information online overwhelming. More than a third (37%) didn't understand how to manage a respiratory infection at home. Sanofi needed a disease-awareness campaign that closed that gap in plain language.

Parents don't need to know the name of the virus. They need to know when to seek help. Campaign key message, HCP Leadership Team consensus

The decisions that shaped the writing

• Symptoms, not terminology. If a parent doesn't know the words RSV or bronchiolitis, they can't search for them. So the copy was built around what a parent can actually see: breathing fast, pulling the stomach in, going grey, not feeding. It was written to match the questions they genuinely type at 2am: Why is my baby breathing quickly? Why is my baby sucking its stomach in while breathing?
• Empower, don't guilt. We set a deliberate tone rule against the accusatory register that a lot of Covid-19 messaging had fallen into. Respiratory infections were reframed as a normal part of growing up, with the red-flag symptoms carried clearly alongside, so a parent could act without being told they'd failed.
• A traffic-light structure. Existing symptom / seek-help conventions were used rather than invented, with the advice tailored by age group, because a six-week-old and a three-year-old are not the same reader.
• Written for people who aren't online. The households most exposed to RSV are the least likely to have reliable internet. So the plan put the words where they'd actually be seen: laminated sheets, fridge magnets, stickers in the Red Book, foodbank leaflets, waiting-room video, not only a website.

What I wrote

The parent-facing booklet What parents should know about RSV, copy for the campaign site at togetheragainstrsv.co.uk, and the HCP Leadership Team insights report that translated a clinical consensus into a communications plan the rest of the team could build from.

The scale of the problem

• 90%of children affected by RSV by age two (around 2 million in the UK)
• 30,000under-fives hospitalised in the UK every year
• 467,000GP visits a year
• £80mtotal annual cost to the UK: £65m healthcare, £14m lost productivity, £1.5m out-of-pocket

Economic and societal impact research by RAND Europe and the University of Cambridge, commissioned for the campaign.

Vaxzevria Global Trust Programme

Rebuilding confidence in a vaccine under the world’s microscope.

BCW Global was engaged by AstraZeneca in May 2021 to manage global communications for Vaxzevria, following reports of rare side effects and disruption to supply. Public confidence was fragmenting at precisely the moment the world needed it to hold.

The job was not to repair a reputation. It was to restore confidence in a vaccine that millions of people still needed to take.

What the work involved

• Media listening and sentiment tracking across markets in real time, so the response followed what people were actually saying that morning rather than what had been agreed the week before.
• Copy that had to be three things at once: medically precise, genuinely empathetic, and robust enough to survive the most hostile reading anyone could give it.
• Regulatory-compliant writing at speed, under simultaneous scrutiny from governments, regulators and the global press.

Why it is the hardest kind of writing

Most copy gets read once, generously. This was read by regulators checking it against the label, by journalists looking for an inconsistency, and by people deciding whether to put something in their arm. Every word had to earn its place, and the ones that did not were the ones that started a news cycle.

Outcome

A coordinated global communications response supporting AstraZeneca’s effort to stabilise confidence in Vaxzevria, through one of the most scrutinised pharmaceutical briefs of the pandemic.

Pride of Britain

A bank's elephant in a superhero cape, a mural the size of a building, and a lot of people who'd never been thanked.

TSB's partnership with the Pride of Britain Awards celebrates people who have held their communities together, during the cost-of-living crisis in particular. I concepted and wrote across three strands of it, and the work ran from a thirty-second idea to the side of a building in East London.

Strand one: the TV idents

I concepted and wrote TSB's Pride of Britain TV idents. The idea takes the superhero trope and then withdraws it: Tiny, TSB's elephant, poses as a superhero, and in each abridged story a small fail gives her away as entirely ordinary. Because true heroes don't wear capes.

That inversion is what made it usable for a bank. The brand is the one tripping over its own cape; the actual heroes are the people collecting the award. It gave TSB a legitimate way to talk about community without claiming any of the credit for it.

Celebrating the true heroes of Britain. TSB are proud partners of the Pride of Britain Awards. Ident voiceover

Strand two: the interview films

For the winner films, I wrote the interview questions and shaped the edits.

Strand three: Michelle's mural, OOH and earned media

The biggest expression of the partnership was a portrait of Michelle painted by Global Street Art on Tabernacle Street in East London, understood to be the largest portrait mural ever created in the UK.

• The mural anchored a fame-driving OOH plan developed by the7stars, with high-impact sites across key UK cities and a deliberate skew toward Michelle's own home in East London, so that the people who know her saw her first.
• the7stars and Global also built a partnership with Heart Radio, inviting listeners to nominate people in their community who had helped others. Winners and their stories featured across key Heart segments, with listeners pointed down to Tabernacle Street to see the mural for themselves.
• The OOH sat inside a broader cross-channel approach showing how TSB recognises the people who held their communities together through the cost-of-living crisis.

The Hunger Monster

Child food poverty, given a shape you couldn't look away from.

Statistics about child hunger don't move people. Aldi UK had partnered with Marcus Rashford and Neighbourly on a pledge of ten million meals, and needed a campaign that would cut through and convert awareness into real food donations.

So we gave hunger a body. The campaign centred on an animation illustrated by children's illustrator Lisa Stickley, with a poem by Giles Andreae, narrated by Marcus Rashford, personifying hunger as a monster and following what it does to a child's day. Rashford said afterwards that reading it felt like talking about himself ten years earlier. His involvement gave it an authenticity no paid media could replicate.

A children's illustrator, a poet and a footballer, used to say the thing a press release had failed to say for a decade.

What sat behind it

• 71%increase in demand for food provision over six months
• 96%of supported children missing meals at least weekly
• 42%going without three times a week
• 14%missing a meal every single day

What it did

• 1.88Mviews of the animation
• 1.5Btotal media reach
• 623pieces of coverage
• £34kdonated in three weeks
• 1.17Mmeals donated in month one

Purpose Awards finalist. Aldi UK's partnership with Marcus Rashford and Neighbourly, launched January 2021.

Safe Spaces

Writing for a reader who cannot be seen reading it.

Copywriting lead on TSB becoming the first UK bank to offer Safe Spaces for victims of domestic abuse across 290 branches, and on the first Emergency Flee Fund of its kind. A private consultation room anyone can use, with information on how to reach specialist services, and money to leave with.

The copy had an unusual constraint: it has to reach somebody whose phone and movements may be monitored. Warm without being patronising. Urgent without being alarming. A public health campaign delivered through banking infrastructure.

• No euphemism. The window says what the room is for, because somebody scanning a high street for an exit does not have time to decode a metaphor.
• No instruction. Nothing that tells a reader what to do next in a situation where being told what to do is part of the problem.
• The room first, the service second. The offer is a door that closes, not a leaflet.

A Unique Bond

Shifting one of the world's largest pharma companies from cold and corporate to compassionate.

Boehringer Ingelheim works across both human and animal medicine, and A Unique Bond is the positioning that joins them. It is grounded in a simple truth: 96% of dog owners report a positive daily impact from their pet. It builds from there into an argument about what an animal does for somebody living with illness.

Real patient stories. Real animals. Real feeling. I contributed to the campaign and to ongoing execution and materials as it extended across international markets, writing to carry a corporate structure without ever sounding like one: the reader meets a dog on a riverbank, not a business unit.

• 96%of dog owners report a positive daily impact from their pet

Time To Act

Don't let Covid-19 stop you from tackling cancer.

Cancer screening collapsed. Diagnostics stalled. Over one million cancer cases are estimated to have been missed across Europe. Time To Act had to persuade people that a hospital was a place to go back to, at a moment when two years of messaging had told them the opposite.

The writing worked against a reflex rather than a knowledge gap, which changes the job: there was nothing to explain, only permission to grant. Short, repeated, and unambiguous about the cost of waiting. It was translated into 30 languages and activated through 12 national launches with Health Ministers and MEPs, with a bespoke Data Navigator built to carry the evidence.

• 1M+estimated cancer cases missed across Europe due to Covid-19
• 30languages the campaign was translated into
• 12national launches with Health Ministers and MEPs

The detail nobody reads

Scam awareness built on the way people actually read a brand name, which is to say, they don't.

Nobody reads a bank's name. They recognise its shape: the colour, the logo, the rough length of the word. Then they move on. That habit is exactly what a spoofed text message or a cloned login page is built to exploit.

So the execution made the reader fail in public: a branch front, photographed as you'd see it from across the road, with one letter swapped. Most people don't catch it. That's not a joke at the reader's expense. It is the whole argument, demonstrated in about a second and a half, before a single line of body copy has to do any work.

The model underneath

The creative sat on a four-ring model of who the communications have to reach and what each ring needs, because “educate customers about fraud” is not one job, it's four, and they need four different registers.

• Society, the public square. Educate. Broad, unembarrassing, shareable.
• The safe space. Help customers stay safe at all times. Habit-forming, low-anxiety.
• High-risk customers (top three deciles). Actively intervene. Direct and specific.
• The fraud space, or “hot states”. Empower a customer mid-scam to spot it and get themselves out. Short, imperative, written for someone who is already frightened.

Brand and always-on

Five years of making a mid-size bank sound like one thing across every channel it owns.

The permanent job at TSB is consistency: leading the strategic development of brand messaging across multi-channel campaigns, and implementing the tone of voice guide so that a prize-draw email, a business TV advert and a branch poster sound like the same bank. Alongside that, I built a custom model with Adobe to give the business full flexibility rolling design out, so the team could move at the speed the channels actually demand.

Brand character evolution

Tiny, TSB's elephant, began life as a physical puppet created by McCann London. I worked on the brand side of her evolution into a fully owned 3D character, built by Sandstorm Films, which removed the production ceiling a puppet puts on a brand and unlocked creative control across every channel and execution.

Santander acquisition

Led consumer communications for TSB's acquisition by Santander, developing the welcome journey copy for TSB customers navigating a major bank rebrand, and translating complex regulatory and product change messaging into clear, reassuring copy at scale.

Sponsorship, product and prize draw

Writing, by form

The pieces where the craft is in the sentence rather than the idea.

Brands worked with

Across agency and in-house, 2017 to now.

• TSB Bank
• Sanofi
• Aldi UK
• AstraZeneca
• Pfizer
• Dove
• Purina
• Polestar
• Boehringer Ingelheim
• Lloyds Banking Group
• Wizarding World
• European Cancer Organisation
• Hestia
• Neighbourly
• Pride of Britain Awards

Specialisms

• Brand messaging and tone of voice across multi-channel campaigns
• Healthcare and pharma copy, including MLR and legal sign-off workflows
• Corporate communications, crisis communications and reputation
• TV, OOH, digital, social, events and internal campaigns
• Presenting to senior and board-level stakeholders, including account-winning new business pitches
• Managing junior copywriters, junior art directors and interns