What a month...
In this month’s round up, I talk through GSK IMPACT Awards, a new awareness campaign for a $billion-dollar US client, new talent, ICE Awards, TikTok, and more...
GSK IMPACT AWARDS 16 MAY, LONDON
2024 was Toucan’s 10th year producing the GSK IMPACT Awards in partnership with The King’s Fund (overview film above). It is the first project we landed as a strategic and creative consultancy and one that is very close to our hearts. Over the years we’ve had the privilege of telling the stories of over 100 charities making emotional and compelling films for each winner and producing the awards ceremony which is live-streamed onto YouTube. It is such an honour to be able to highlight the incredible work the winners do to improve the health of their communities. It’s always a very emotional event, even more so for me this year and, as I sat in the audience taking it all in and reflecting over the last decade of working on this amazing programme, my heart swelled with pride at the hard work, dedication, and love shown by the Toucan team to deliver our best for the winners.
Sarah Woolnough, CEO of The King’s Fund stated how impactful the films were, and GSK Chairman Sir Jon Symonds commented: “The films are amazing, Lynn, the team, you’ve done it again. They bring to life what we read in the assessments.”
Sally Nettleton reflects on what it takes to innovate a project over 10 years in her article this month here.
NEW DIGITAL STORYTELLING AWARENESS CAMPAIGN FOR $BILLON-DOLLAR US CLIENT
We’ve been developing a brand awareness campaign for a new US client for the last six months, which is now live and driving awareness in the science and tech world. Although we’re not at liberty to share details at the current time, we are extremely proud of the work and resulting output. The partnership on this project came from a past client referral who brought us in knowing our strategic and creative capabilities were a perfect match for their challenge. The global brand collaborated with Toucan to develop a bold multi-phased digital and social campaign to raise awareness of the brand to a niche and hard-to-reach audience.
Our strategic work set out to tap into the science and innovation community, so a creative approach was needed to satisfy their constant curiosity. We did this through impactful visual storytelling which captured the attention and drove awareness of the brand, how they help, why they should consider them, and ultimately what they do to help. Today we have a very happy client as the campaign continues to gather momentum.
RECENT APPOINTMENTS
(pictured above and below from L to R: Lynn, Chris, Roz)
Connor Kent joined Toucan last month as Content Producer bringing 8 years’ experience as a freelance producer across TV, audio and digital. His TV credits include Would I Lie to You? For BBC, Never Mind the Buzzcocks for Sky Max and 4 series of BAFTA Award winning cult hit Taskmaster. He has managed and produced content for various social media accounts, including for ‘Celebrity Juice’ which reached over 2 million followers across platforms. Additionally, he has written for ‘Have I Got News For You’ for BBC and for various radio series for BBC Radio 4.
Chris Doggart has joined us this month on a 6-month MAT cover as Client Services Director. A well-known senior strategic figure with experience of working with large brands overseeing multi-million pound budgets, Chris has a stellar background in the event/experience/production industry having worked for leading UK and global organisations such as PSL Events, George P Johnson and Fisher Productions.
Roz Johnston joins Toucan this month as Creative Resourcing manager. Roz is an enthusiastic and pro-active traffic resource manager with over 10 years experience of working within fast-paced brand-led leading design agencies. Roz will join the team managing all creative traffic across both agency and client projects.
MEET UP WITH FELLOW AGENCY OWNER, DIANA ELLIS-HILL, CO-FOUNDER OF BE THE FOX
My Co-Founder, Sally Nettleton and I met up with Diana Ellis-Hill (another female founder) from Brighton-based agency, Be The Fox, for a share and catch up. We were introduced by Diana’s partner Trak Ellis-Hill, a Creative Director who has worked with us on projects at Toucan. It’s always great to share experiences with other agency owners, especially female founders like myself and Sally. You always learn something new.
We shared a laugh or two (or maybe it was three)! We also shared some of the challenges and stresses of running an agency and the mistakes we’d each made on the journey to get to where we are today which was incredibly liberating as we had both experienced such similar challenges. We also talked about where and how we might be able to work together in the future.
I thought it worth a mention because it’s so key to stop and reflect on your journey every now and again. Learning from the past and looking ahead to the future. It’s great to do that with someone else who has been on the same journey and it’s so refreshing to know that you’re not alone! I’ve since joined The Agency Collective to connect with other agency owners, get peer support, and learn ever more about how to run a happy, healthy, and successful agency.
INTERNSHIPS - SUPPORTING THE NEXT GENERATION
We recognise that the next generation coming into the workplace are our future. Helping them transition into the working environment is so important for their understanding of what the professional environment is like, how they interact with people, developing interpersonal skills and getting a general idea of where their future career might take them. We’re working with various agencies to support internship programmes and offer placements out across a range of departments. Watch out for news of their progress across our socials in the coming months.
ICE AWARDS: 11 JULY 2024
I’m judging for a second year running, this time for the ‘Team of the Year Award’. Set up by the charismatic industry influencer, Anita Howard, the ICE AWARDS is now in its 10th successful year and recognises the work of corporate event planners. Many of our clients cover internal comms and plan events as part of their role. This was a natural fit for me to get involved. This year I will be facilitating a group during the ICEDAY conference and have now completed judging my category. It’s been a tough one as there are so many fantastic examples of great teamwork and collaboration. All I can say is that the judging was really close but we have managed to agree on the finalists.
SITE VISITS GALORE IN LONDON
We’ve been commissioned for a client event bringing their global leadership together in London in September so I joined the site visits at The Tate and Tower Bridge. They’re such fab venues who looked after my team and the client extremely well as we walked through the possibilities of the delegate experience. Very much looking forward to seeing the team bring this to life with the client teams over the coming months.
KEEPING INTERNAL COMMS TO THE POINT
We all know how effective communication with internal teams is paramount to a business's success. Given the variety of platform options that are available to businesses, we decided to ask our own internal teams what they thought. Led by our Operations Manager, Sally Goold, we will be launching a new comms system to the teams at the end of the month, which will have been designed in consultation with our people.
AGENCY GROWTH SESSION AT TIKTOK HQ, LONDON
Did you know that TikTok UK alone has 32.2m monthly users with 212bn monthly video views spending on average 90+ minutes each day consuming content? No I hear you say… well, neither did I. My Co-Founder, Sally Nettleton along with Marketing Director, Rachel Hepburn, spent a morning session at the social giant’s HQ to find out more about the platform. No one can deny the growth of this app during the last 4 years has been phenomenal. How we will choose to use it for Toucan is still under development so watch this space for how we might incorporate content on this channel within our marketing mix.
NEW HAIR DO
…and lastly, I did actually manage to fit in a little trip to the hair salon. Unfortunately it wasn’t totally relaxing as I was sat there with laptop on lap catching up on emails!
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