The Mayor of London has a responsibility to protect the wellbeing and safeguard the future of all his constituents. He is also in a unique position to inspire and motivate Londoners. These insights inform the values-based #LondonTogether campaign, which launched last year.
We were asked to produce a campaign that made Londoners feel that they were not alone in the face of the pandemic. Fundamentally, the creative needed to communicate the belief that working together was our key strength in coping with the challenges posed by Covid-19. Our in-house creative team worked with the marketing and digital teams and health experts from our policy teams, as well as the Mayor’s Office to produce a campaign that spoke to Londoners in a time of great difficulty and sacrifice.
Our hero image presented a united face of London through a photomontaged composition, making a hero out of Londoners themselves, and reflecting the city’s diversity through original photography of real Londoners. The accompanying line – we’ll face this together – articulated the values of resilience, hope and solidarity that characterise our city and run through the entire campaign. The statement also acted as a signpost to the resources available at london.gov.uk to help Londoners through the pandemic – we’ll face this together and here’s how. A #LondonTogether page on the website gave users information about health guidance, access to support services helping with bereavement counselling, mental health and domestic abuse, for example.
For an informative, values-based campaign, reach was very important so ensuring that we were covering different media channels made the most sense. Posters were displayed at over 600 sites across London, including on the city’s transport network used by millions of people every day, as well as tube carriage panel adverts and newspaper adverts seen across the network. The Mayor also launched the #LondonTogether campaign with an interview for the Evening Standard newspaper (which is read by over 13 million adults every month) featuring our hero artwork. Organic social media posts on Instagram received 26,000 impressions with a like/share/reply (LSR) rate of 3.3%. The #LondonTogether campaign page received over 60,000 unique page views while the campaign was live, with the majority from the 25-34 age group – our primary target audience. The page received a 20% increase in site views against the overall site average, mostly acquired from social media platforms.
Photomontages are notoriously difficult to get right, and so this was a tough challenge to overcome. With the help of our in-house photographer, we captured images considering how they would line up together and combined these to produce a composition that reflected the city’s diversity whilst presenting a unifying image. Using Adobe Photoshop to edit and treat images and InDesign for laying out the composition, we produced artwork that worked as a whole, striking a necessary tonal balance between the different photos and allowing overlaid text to be clear and impactful.
Double Royal format posters displayed across London's transport network:
Digital adverts displayed on across London high streets:
Newspaper adverts in London's Metro newspaper:
Social media assets:
