The brief was to recruit 70,000 volunteers willing to work throughout the Olympic Games, from 5 a.m. starts to midnight finishes, often without seeing a single event themselves. But the bigger challenge was perception. Volunteering felt worthy rather than exciting, especially to younger people.

Our solution was simple: don’t call them volunteers. That’s what people do in charity shops. We called them Games Makers. The name gave the role status, identity and a sense of purpose. It inspired a new generation, smashed recruitment records and helped change the perception of volunteering in the UK.

AI promised to make creative work faster. In reality, a lot of teams were still wasting time fumbling through prompts, recreating the same instructions and hoping different tools would somehow produce work that still felt like the brand. So I built Malu: a shared creative system that turns brand knowledge, visual rules and production intent into something AI can actually use.

Instead of asking every creative to become a prompt engineer, Malu gives teams a consistent starting point and lets them focus on the work itself. It helps protect the brand, reduces repetition and makes it easier to create recognisably consistent outputs across tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Firefly. Less time explaining what the brand is. More time making things that actually feel like it.

So much in life doesn’t go your way. Lunch shouldn’t be one of those things. That’s the thought behind Get Your Own Way, a brand platform built around Subway’s greatest strength: letting people have things exactly how they want them.

To launch it, we put real fans and their very real orders centre stage, celebrating all the weird, wonderful and wildly specific ways people make Subway their own. It’s since become an ongoing homage to the people who shape the brand as much as we do, with stories pulled from the places fans already talk about it. And yes, some came from Reddit. With permission, of course. Great artists steal. Smarter ones ask first.

How do you advertise one of the biggest games of the year when your competitor has paid millions for the exclusive marketing rights? You don’t. Instead, we noticed Destiny sounded suspiciously like a fragrance, so we created one: Destiny. The New Fragrance by Xbox. A fake product gave us a perfectly real way to remind everyone that the game was available on Xbox too. Did we wander into a legal grey area? Maybe. Did it get noticed? Absolutely.

With just $6,000 in paid media, the idea generated $3.8 million in earned media and helped Xbox take 50% of Destiny sales on a fraction of PlayStation’s spend. Destiny bundles also helped Xbox One outsell PS for the first time. Sometimes having your hands tied forces you to find the better idea.

Iceland had a nice problem to have: everyone wanted to visit. But record tourism was putting pressure on the landscapes and communities people had travelled so far to experience. Telling visitors off wasn’t going to help, so instead we turned Icelanders’ frustrations and advice into something people might actually want to listen to: Iceland Academy, a playful school for learning how to visit the country properly.

Locals became our tutors, teaching everything from responsible travel to avoiding hot-tub awkwardness. With zero media spend, more than 20,000 students from 75 countries enrolled, and at one point we received more applications than Harvard. Not bad for an academy with no campus, no tuition fees and quite a lot of volcanos.

The new Tomb Raider reimagined Lara Croft as a gritty survivalist, launching into one of the busiest periods in gaming. Rather than add another poster to the noise, we turned the oldest advertising medium into an entertainment channel. Survival Billboard put eight gamers on a billboard in central London, where the public controlled the weather via livestream, unleashing blizzards, downpours, wind and heat to see who could survive the longest.

Made with Jim, Jacob, Sanjiv and Jamie, one billboard became a live show people stayed up to watch. Average dwell time went from the usual eight seconds to eight minutes, with 3.5 million views and 32,000 comments in under 22 hours. It went on to win 17 Cannes Lions alongside D&AD, One Show and LIA honours. Turns out people will look at a billboard for quite a long time if you put actual people on it and make them suffer.

Our friends at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity wanted to drive sales of delegate passes, giving holders access to everything the festival has to offer. Rather than targeting those already performing at the highest level, we focused on the people who might get the most from being there: creatives looking for a little more guidance, inspiration and a push in the right direction.

That shift gave us a more interesting role for the festival. Not simply a celebration of the industry’s best work, but a place where the next generation of great work could begin.

As Covid took hold, the world looked to its leaders for answers. The problem was, nobody really had any. There was no precedent, no rulebook and very little certainty. For the FT, that made trusted information more valuable than ever, but subscriptions were heading in the wrong direction.

Working closely with the FT’s in-house team, we turned the campaign around in a single weekend on a shoestring budget, making calls to governments around the world as events changed by the hour. It was fast, scrappy and made for the moment. More importantly, it worked: the decline in subscriptions reversed and new audiences began to grow.

Subway makes sandwiches. Big ones. Over the past year, I’ve led a brand overhaul that has taken its appeal to new heights across the UK and EMEA, creating a more distinctive, confident and consistent version of Subway wherever it shows up. The work has stretched across brand, campaigns, social, digital, in-store and everything in between, helping move Subway from consecutive years in the red back into growth.

What started as a single project quickly grew into an ongoing partnership. One brief became another, then another, as we built trust, expanded the work and found new ways to push the brand forward. A project client became a retainer client, one sub at a time.

Like most insurance brands, Direct Line was seen by tradespeople as a necessary evil. Tool theft was one of their biggest daily battles, with seventy per cent having been victims, yet the law offered vans nowhere near the same protection as offices. Rather than simply make another campaign about theft, we found a way for the brand to actually do something about it: legally reclassifying vans as offices and using that to challenge the law itself.

Produced with our friends at The Glue Society, the work drove an uplift in quotes and improved tradespeople’s opinion of Direct Line. It turned insurance from something that paid out after the problem into a brand willing to fight the problem in the first place. Did it get me a cheaper quote on my extension? No. But that’s life.

Following in the footsteps of Sony’s famous Bouncy Balls and Paint films, the brief was to show off the extraordinary detail of its new 4K TV in a way that felt every bit as spectacular. So we did the sensible thing: stripped what felt like half of Latin America of its flower petals, took millions of them to Costa Rica and fired them out of a volcano.

The film was shot with Jaron Albertin, with stills by Nick Meek. Yes, the guy whose pictures look like Instagram filters, except he got there first and everyone else copied him. The result was a huge, vivid demonstration of 4K detail, made almost entirely for real.

A typical feature film contains somewhere between 130,000 and 173,000 frames. **Six Frames** is my attempt to slow that down and pay attention to just six. Every selection is made by hand, usually after far too much pausing, rewinding and second-guessing. So, as a rule, don’t watch a film with me.

It’s really a celebration of cinematography and the people who make images worth stopping for. Whenever someone asks what I’d be doing if I wasn’t in advertising, I usually say cinematography. Although, if we’re being completely truthful, millionaire is probably the first choice. I’m not sure which is less likely. Until then, this is a growing collection of frames I can’t quite shake. Go have a look.

It’s January. You’re feeling adventurous, curious about veganism, and maybe even tempted to give it a go. But going from meat-eater to fully vegan overnight is a big ask, and for most people, behaviour changes in smaller steps.

So rather than asking people to overhaul everything, we gave them an easier place to start: one meat-free dinner a week. And if you’re going to try something new, you may as well start with something familiar. You can’t go far wrong with the nation’s favourite sausage brand, even when there’s no meat in it.

When you’re exhausted and your head feels like it’s literally retracting into your body, this is the brand that gives you the boost to keep going. We took it from being a simple snack to something with a much clearer role in people’s lives: the little push that helps you get shit done.

The campaign delivered an uplift in brand awareness, with sales improving during the media period versus previous quarters. And yes, the head really did retract. No CGI, no post-production trickery, just a very committed practical effect.

We launched a global campaign for Sony’s flagship phone and needed an idea that could live up to the brand behind it. Sony has spent decades shaping culture through gaming, cameras, TVs and the Walkman, so we looked back at that legacy to show how all of that innovation had now found its way into your pocket.

The campaign was brought to life by Hollywood director Tarsem Singh, with stills shot by some Swedish photographer guy called Marcus, and soundtracked by a David Bowie remix we somehow managed to secure. Bowie’s first reaction when we played it to him was to call us the C-word. He later approved it, and we ended up releasing the track properly. It was big, colourful and gloriously physical, and I’m still finding paint powder in my ears.

The last week of January is grim. Christmas is a distant memory, summer feels a lifetime away, and your calendar is already filling up with things you’d rather not do. So we created a typographic escape from the January blues, with a new piece of work for every day of the week.

It started as spec work, with the typography set by Carl Warren and me, and gave a small brand a much bigger voice in a crowded category. It also gave us the rare professional opportunity to print swear words at scale, which felt like a win in itself.