How we helped The Royal Parks inspire children and adults to promote biodiversity

 
 

Our social campaign brought The Royal Parks’ Mission Invertebrate project to new audiences, motivating them to engage with the charity’s biodiversity drive.


The Thinking

The Royal Parks charity cares for London’s Royal Parks, with over 5,000 acres of free and accessible historic parkland for all to enjoy. The Royal Parks’ Mission Invertebrate project brings together ecologists, park teams and the public to help insects thrive. Keen to increase public engagement with this mission, The Royal Parks turned to distillery. At the time, London was under Covid-19 restrictions, and we understood how valuable parks were to people seeking space, sanctuary and social interaction. Our #morethanbugs campaign was born.


The Making

First, we focused on raising awareness of Mission Invertebrate among new audiences. We created a wide variety of visual assets, including stills, animations and infographics for Instagram and Facebook to illustrate the abundance of invertebrate varieties in The Royal Parks, and why they are so important. We also engaged key influencers to spread the message further.


We then focused on engagement, creating downloadable trail-walk maps and accompanying visuals to encourage the public to visit the parks and discover the diverse invertebrate wildlife for themselves.


The Blowing Up

An initial 3-week paid social campaign on Instagram and Facebook saw our visual assets targeted at all genders aged 18-65 in locations around the Royal Parks themselves, as well as at relevant outdoor enthusiast interest groups. We also paid key influencers to amplify our content in their Instagram feeds and stories, to ensure as many nature enthusiasts as possible found out about Mission Invertebrate. 

Based on the reach of this first phase, we then expanded our location to an 18km radius around London for another 3-week paid social campaign, supported by more influencer content to encourage the public to visit the Mission Invertebrate website, download one of our trail-walk maps and explore the parks’ biodiversity up close.


The Positive Impact

Our #morethanbugs campaign reached over 1.4m users in the engagement phase, with the number of link clicks 5 times higher than our target, showing a deep level of engagement, with users keen to learn more. 

Positive sentiment saw users leaving supportive comments about the parks, with the statistics we showcased generating questions and comments across both social channels. 

The second phase, motivating users to visit the Mission Invertebrate site and go on one of the trail walks, generated over 1.5m impressions. Link clicks were again 5 times the target, reflecting a high level of interest in the posts. Among the positive comments across both channels were many users saying they would do at least one of the walks and others tagging friends to encourage them to take part.

Our carefully targeted influencers reached a further 17,000 outdoor and nature enthusiasts, generating 6,000 likes. 

How we created a children’s storybook for Chinese New Year - powered entirely by AI.


The Thinking

We wanted to do something special to celebrate this Chinese New Year. Officially the year of the rabbit, this new year coincided with the unveiling of the awesome power of Chat-GPT, suggesting it could well be the year of AI too. We were excited to see what other generative-AI platforms were capable of, and decided to combine them to show our clients that, as B2B tech experts, we don’t just write about tech, we use it to power our social content. Which is how we got the idea for an AI-powered children’s storybook.

The Making

We combined tradition with cutting-edge technology, letting our creative team loose on a range of AI tools to create a children’s storybook starring the animals of the Chinese zodiac. We used AI to produce every element of the work, with the script written by Chat GPT, the visuals by MidJourney AI, Murbert AI composing the music, and Narakeet AI narrating the story. We even used our very own AI tool voundry to distribute the content to our clients. The result is a visually captivating immersive journey through the customs and celebrations of the Chinese New Year.


The Blowing Up

We used our own AI-powered video personalisation engine voundry to personalise and distribute the storybook to all our clients and wider networks as a digital greeting card. We also shared the storybook on our website and social channels, with our industry partners, and with the trade press. Naturally we wrote the press release using ChatGPT.


The Positive Impact

News of our storybook travelled fast, and was picked up by numerous online media and marketing publications including the Drum, Adobo, Campaign Asia, Campaign Brief Asia and Roastbrief, generating new business leads, and showcasing how distillery is embracing an AI-powered future.

Keeping Chinese New Year traditions alive during the pandemic

The Thinking

Chinese New Year, also known as Lunar New Year, is the largest and most important celebration among the Chinese people in Asia. However, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, large traditional gatherings to celebrate this occasion had to be cancelled, and as people were only allowed to meet in small groups. Even then, people had to distance themselves socially. 

Keeping that in mind, the distillery team saw an opportunity to honour a longstanding Chinese New Year tradition in 2021 – the giving of hong bao – in a socially safe way.

Hong bao is a red envelope with cash inside. It is a form of well wishes that’s given to family members and close friends during Chinese New Year. The giving of hong bao is a familiar ritual across East and South-East Asian cultures. With social distancing in mind, distillery came up with a simple, fun idea: to create a long hong bao that would ensure safe distancing, while keeping to tradition.

The Making

We created 88 one metre-long red envelopes for people to give out while keeping a safe distance from one another during Chinese New Year festivities. Since the hong baos were to be given out in Singapore, we designed the envelopes with the precise measurement of one metre, the legal requirement for social distancing in Singapore. To celebrate the year of the Ox, we also designed the envelope with the artwork of an Ox, stretching its long horns from end to end.

 
 

The Blowing Up

Apart from the physical hong baos that were made, we also created a Chinese New Year greeting in the form of a comical video featuring the hong bao packet. A QR code on the red envelope directed people to watch the video. 

Although we sent the majority of the red packets to clients, we also made sure there were enough available to anyone who wanted this unique memorabilia. The unique concept was even picked up and featured on Campaign Asia, Adobo Magazine, and Campaign Brief.

 
 

The Positive Impact

Our goal for this project was simply to put a smile on the faces of our clients and their families during the pandemic, but the long hong baos went the extra mile. Well received by all our clients and potential clients, the hong baos brought new business opportunities and projects to distillery. And despite plans for distribution in Singapore only, people from around the world who had heard about this were requesting to get their hands on one.

Women can

 
 

We helped Blazeclan #BreakTheBias for women in tech for International Women’s Day 2022.


The Thinking

Blazeclan, a global cloud consultancy, wanted to celebrate International Women’s Day and join the conversation around #BreakTheBias by showcasing their female employees and clients who are leaders in the tech space.


The Making

We conceptualized a content-led campaign that focussed on the stereotypes often heard about women in the tech space, specifically on what they can’t do. To break the bias in a visual way, we filmed each woman crossing out the “‘t” in can’t, changing the narrative to what women can do. 

With Covid-19 impacting production capabilities, we filmed video calls and added motion graphics to show the women crossing out the text on screen.


The Blowing Up

We used the #BreakTheBias hashtag for International Women’s Day to give our campaign reach.


Positive Impact

The campaign was posted across social channels, and became the most viewed and shared video on Blazeclan’s Linkedin page in 2022.

Delivering a WorldClass awards show for Midea and Man City

We helped connect the world class performance of EPL winners Man City with the excellence of the Midea home appliances.

The Thinking:

Midea wanted to leverage their Man City partnership with an end-of-season campaign that celebrated the team's success on the pitch, coupled with their world class appliances.

The Making:

We developed the Midea WorldClass Awards, an unusual and light-hearted play on the popular end-of-season awards. This celebrated the players that delivered on the pitch, with each award category and trophy focussed on a Midea product name. 

To promote the voting microsite, we produced nine social videos, featuring two club legends delivering the awards around Manchester, as well as supporting digital, CRM and social content. After voting closed, we released a winners announcement video, and 100 fans were rewarded with Man City merchandise.

The Blowing Up:

The campaign ran across global and local Midea channels, as well as a paid partnership with OneFootball. Man City and the players also shared the content, giving us unprecedented reach to our target audience.

The Positive Impact:

The campaign ran across global and local Midea channels, as well as a paid partnership with OneFootball. Man City and the players also shared the content, giving us unprecedented reach to our target audience.


Ran in 48 countries   

1.5m video views  

48m reach

Here’s how we are helping Okta to expand its presence in EMEA


The Thinking

Global identity management leader Okta wanted to move to the next level in EMEA, with a customer advocacy programme that would support its growth and momentum. To make this happen, the Okta team approached distillery to help them tell clear and effective stories of customers who have successfully implemented the company’s cybersecurity technology and are seeing amazing results.

The Making

We produce a wide range of written case study and social content to help bring Okta’s stories of customer success to life.

We research, prep and interview key leadership from Okta’s customers across industries, from agriculture to logistics and everything in between.

From a single interview, we can create afull package of assets, including a case study, PDF summary, blog post, go-to-market slide, social assets and more.

 
 


The Blowing Up

Through rethinking conventional ways of telling valuable customer stories, distillery aims to help expand the reach and maximise the lifespan of Okta’s customer content across channels and formats.

Our blog posts can be written from the perspective of an Okta customer, bring them into the conversation through a Q&A format, or group several customers together for an industry spotlight, to keep content versatile.

Our social posts complement existing Okta branding, while raising the bar for visually engaging assets that follow best practices for gaining visibility and traction on social media.

We translate Okta content into multiple languages to cater for different audiences across the EMEA region. Our team of multilingual writers cover French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch, as well as English.

The Positive Impact

From our initial proposal to the Okta team, where we shared ideas on raising the bar for case studies in Europe - from how they’re written to how they’re amplified on social - it’s been an exciting and productive collaboration. 

If you’d like to find out how we can make a positive impact for your brand, get in touch.

DEC social content campaign: Helping to raise over £280M for emergency humanitarian response around the world

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) provides swift humanitarian aid worldwide in times of crisis. Our pop-up content studio helps them raise awareness and funds by creating, making and spreading targeted content to the right people, on the right platforms, as soon as disaster strikes.

The Backstory

When disaster strikes anywhere in the world, the Disasters Emergency Committee, or DEC, unites 14 UK-based aid agencies on a national effort to collect the funds needed to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the victims. Funds are raised largely thanks to the generosity of the UK public, and then distributed among the DEC member agencies best placed to deliver quick and effective aid to those in most need.

The Insight

Each DEC appeal depends on fast, effective and targeted communication. As soon as a humanitarian crisis emerges, the DEC needs to educate the UK public about the response efforts that need to happen, and how individuals can help by making donations.

In other words, the DEC needs an agile team capable of producing compelling and targeted content at scale, at short notice. On top of that, they need a team who can deliver this content to the right people, on the right platforms, as fast as possible. That’s why, at each appeal, we move our expertise–and part of our team to the DEC HQ.

The Creative

To pull off a targeted, strategic content plan while racing against time, we draw on many of our capabilities:

An agile workflow geared to crisis support

We understand the urgent and unpredictable nature of the DEC’s work. Our agile approach enables us to move part of our team into their office to better service the fast changing nature of a disaster appeal in a fast turnaround setting, every time our client needs us. 

Live streaming to enable real-time communication

To inform the UK public in real time about what’s happening, answer their questions, and link them to the field, we organise live streams from the DEC HQ and from the places in crisis. This enables our client to share the progress of appeals with supporters and provide accountability, explaining how their donations are helping victims in practice. Our live streams enable authentic stories to emerge from disaster zones so the larger public can learn about developments on the ground as they unfold.

Engaging celebrities to drive awareness

Celebrity endorsement can help drive awareness and fundraising to DEC appeals, and we’re always ready to welcome them to our pop-up content studio to maximise that. We’ve worked with the likes of Keira Knightly, Bear Grylls, and Daniel Craig to spread the word about our client’s appeals, resulting in 100,00’s of views.

Co-creating with influencers to spread the word

To disseminate our client’s message beyond their channels, we collaborated with influencers such as award winning design blogger and Instagrammer Geraldine Tan, internationally acclaimed professional Pâtissier Eric Lanlard, and the popular top-10-videos YouTube channel Alltime10s–creating content that appeals to a widely varied audience. 

We also organised fast turnaround initiatives, such as ‘Hack the appeal”, inviting YouTubers into the London YouTube space so they could create content about DEC appeals with our support. The content resulting from our initiatives attracted hundreds of thousands of views and tens of thousands of clicks through to the DEC appeal landing page.

Running events that mobilise influencer support

Key to our approach towards influencer collaboration is co-creation: we want influencers to create authentic content that resonates with their audience, but we also provide support to ensure that key DEC messaging is passed on and remains true to our client’s vision. 

But after collaborating with influencers, we realised that one of the DEC’s main challenges was not only messaging but timing: how to mobilise these content creators at short notice to get immediate support when promoting appeals?

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To answer this question, we created an event for high profile online influencers to educate them on our client’s work, the kind of humanitarian aid they could enable by supporting these campaigns, and to establish a channel for communication among influencers and our client, leaving a seed for future collaborations between them.

Delivering long-term value through social content strategy sessions

To empower all DEC member agencies to launch more cohesive content during appeals, we delivered video social content strategy workshops. We tailored our sessions to educate the charities involved on how they can create YouTube programming calendars, harness user generated content, practice social listening, create targeted funnels, and test new asset formats in the future, when running awareness campaigns online. 

Sweating the assets across social media

By continuously analysing our performance in real time during each campaign, we aimed to improve our targeting strategy and make the most of our assets through time. During the Nepal Earthquake Appeal, for example, we launched the hashtag #Shaken and prompted social media users to create and share mandalas as a way of raising awareness about the appeal among their digital communities. During the Yemen campaign, we launched #HelpFeedYemen to encourage Instagrammers to talk about the appeal with their followers by sharing an empty plate in a creative way that resonated with their audience. Initiatives such as these have led to celebrity, influencer and brand involvement in our campaigns, helping us spread our client’s appeals to social media users.

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Engaging with social listening, we identified topics that we could explore to keep our audience engaged at key stages of the appeal by creating assets with the limited content we had at hand and . One example is a short explanatory video about Plumpy’Nut–a cheap and nutritious food supplement delivered to those in severe malnutrition conditions by DEC member agencies, thanks to public donations.

Collaborating with other creative agencies to take online campaigns offline

14 charities now sit under the umbrella of the DEC. So when an appeal is launched, the DEC works with a number of agencies to deliver a cohesive message to raise the maximum amount of money possible. We integrate those elements in our own content too, to ensure cohesion across the campaign in its multiple environments. We have seen our work translated everywhere from TV to billboards, to the tube .

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Keeping the content alive by shooting original stories on the ground

By heroing the amazing efforts of fundraisers between appeals, we continue the conversation about the DEC’s work.

Three months after the Nepal Earthquake Appeal, we surprised Julius–a Phillipino citizen who, touched by the help provided by the DEC to his own country after the 2013 typhoon, helped raise funds for the Nepal Earthquake Appeal as his way of paying it forward–on one of his training runs in Richmond Park.

We then went on to film his journey in the Himalayan country as he saw firsthand where the donations to the appeal were making a difference–and captured the touching moment when the Nepalese people expressed their gratitude to him.

The Evidence

So far, we’ve worked on six DEC appeals, helping to raise over £280 million to support emergency humanitarian response around the world. Our pop-up content studio has enabled influencer participation and celebrity endorsement for these important appeals. We’ve been able to drive widespread public engagement by amplifying DEC appeals with creativity and strategic thinking and we’ve transformed fundraising messages into explosive awareness campaigns that reached the right people, at the right time, on the right platforms–and continue to spread long after we’ve moved back into our own office.

““distillery are superb! Having spent five years working together across six DEC appeals, I can wholeheartedly recommend them. I’ve been constantly impressed with their sheer creativity, unrelenting focus under pressure, and exceptionally high quality work, which has been unmatched in my 15 years working in digital.””
— Leon Green, Digital Manager, Disasters Emergency Committee

The Magic

Each DEC appeal has drawn on so many of distillery’s capabilities to create, make and spread the right content, the right way, while racing against time.We’re proud of the hard work that goes into helping the DEC assist those in need—as well as our partnership of four and a half years and counting.

To learn more about the things we can do for your brand, please get in touch.