We’ve had some huge wins as an agency this year, so it’s been fun to look back on everything we’ve achieved since we hit the ground running on January 3rd 2023. Amy Winter recaps on our campaign success throughout the year. Take it away, Amy!
There are too many to mention, really, but here are a few of our favourites from the past 300 and something days.
Oatly - “It’s like milk...”
At the end of 2022 we were tasked with launching Oatly in Ireland in the new year. That’s no mean feat in a country that loves cows.
The brief was to put the name of the world’s original and largest oat drink brand on the lips of every conscientious consumer in the country, from the plant-alternative-curious to the “never-tried-the-like-of-it”s.
We worked with Oatly’s incredible PR and social media team to create a communications campaign that covered consumer media, trade media, consumers and social media users.
Working hand-in-hand with the company’s advertising team, we made sure Oatly’s name was being seen EVERYWHERE on the streets of Dublin and beyond.
Our tactics included placing an interview with Oatly’s UK General Manager with the farming team at the Irish Independent, creating a vast social influencer engagement programme through video content and gifting, and creating and promoting research into Ireland’s attitudes towards plant-based products.
Our campaign scored national press coverage, oodles of trade coverage, hundreds of thousands of social media views and, most importantly, supported a successful launch for the brand in Ireland.
Watch this space for further shenanigans from Clearbox x Oatly in 2024!
Awards season at Amazon
There are hundreds of incredible people working in Amazon buildings all over the UK. One of the privileges of our job is that we get to speak to so many of them.
Whether it was telling the stories of veterans, those who said “I’m proud to be me” during Pride month, or those with weird and wonderful talents during Amazon’s Got Talent, we’ve met just about anyone you could imagine this year.
In June, two awards ceremonies at Amazon kept us busy - the BENtastic Awards (run by Amazon’s Black Employee Network) and the everywoman in Logistics and Transport Awards.
We got to hear from the amazing award nominees and winners and then share their stories with the local media - meaning that their achievements were not only recognised internally, but by people in their neighbourhoods and those who love them. We love creating fridge worthy newspaper cut outs for family and friends.
It’s an honour to be trusted with people’s stories and we’re grateful to our friends from Amazon’s internal PR team for continuing to send them our way.
Sky - The Lovers premiere
Every so often we get to roll out a red carpet and put on our glad rags.
In September, we donned our blacks and headed east to host the premiere of Sky’s new Belfast-based television series, The Lovers.
With help from local suppliers including The Strand cinema and Cyprus Avenue we organised and executed a premiere for local media, influencers, and of course, talent, to celebrate the show’s release in the city it was filmed in.
Weeks of planning came together to create a beautiful evening that celebrated Belfast and its talent in all their glory. We made friends with drivers, hung many posters, and acted as stage hands, amongst other roles, and we’d do it again in a heartbeat.
John and I might have lost our minds over the presence of a certain Northern Irish godfather of punk at said premiere…
Speaking of John, we can’t reflect on our year without hearing from the man himself:
The highlight for me this year has not been a particular campaign or idea, but the impact of the work we do for our clients and their communities. I’ve really noticed an evolution of the impact of Clearbox’s work this year. We’ve helped Amazon to positively impact communities in the UK and Ireland and supported teams on the ground in Morocco following the devastating earthquake. We helped Oatly to launch in Ireland to much fanfare while driving real behavioural change, and supported Sky to bring the excellent and hilarious show The Lovers to life round the corner from where it was filmed.
We celebrated the military heroes now doing great things at Amazon, while also profiling the impact of the brilliant people who work in Amazon buildings in the UK and Ireland. Our social media work helped clients like 3EN and Incorporate Benefits reach new audiences on LinkedIn, and we helped increase the number of younger shoppers visiting Morelli’s Ice Cream stores across the country with our Instagram and TikTok campaigns for the brand. We helped Taste & Tour elevate its profile and very soon, we'll be helping the brilliant company launch in a new market.
We helped to bring impactful, important programmes like the Amazon Future Engineer Bursary to life, while helping US market leading restaurant tech company Toast to launch in the UK in Ireland will have a positive impact on hospitality businesses for many years to come. We teamed up once again to celebrate Synergy Learning’s brilliant people and processes, including a £30,000 donation to The Simon Community in Northern Ireland, while communicating the benefits of low code/no code tech for SMEs and large corporations for the fantastic team at Neptune Software. We rounded off the year with our brand new client, Deliveroo, helping its great team mark the major milestone of donating more than 300,000 meals to vulnerable people in Ireland via FoodCloud.
We also tried our best to make sure Clearbox continues to have a positive impact on our own community by making donations to charities like CROCUS, The Portadown Festival and Drake Music NI.
We continued to care immensely about what we do, who we do it for and why we do it.
Thanks, 2023 – you’ve been kind to us.
