As most people know, Paula Radcliffe set the world record for the marathon in 2003, with a time of 2:15:25; a time that, all these years later, no one has even got within 3 minutes of beating. Wanting to find a different take on her brilliance, I did a bit of digging and discovered something amazing: there are 15 pure running races in athletics and, at that time, Paula Radcliffe held the world record for 9 of them. For Pete’s sake, how good was she?
(Love the shoddy ‘idea only’ copywriter layout.)

This ad is why I think advertising can be desirable and worthwhile. A message of real interest to new parents (the best place to take your baby’s temperature is their temple) and a simple, intelligent, witty execution (if I do say so myself).

A genuinely human and caring recruitment company and an idea that describes work and its possibilities in a more insightful and empowering way.

A big, global film about the wider, unseen, local support team behind an Olympic athlete, all sending messages of heartfelt support by mimicking his/her sport in their own not-very-good way. This turns into a poster and social campaign to encourage the public to send their own message too; all they have to do is be filmed or photographed doing the event that their Olympic hero does. This idea won McDonald’s global Olympics pitch but never ran because not enough markets committed to supporting the Olympics in their marketing calendar.

The Big Mac is one of the most famous and iconic products in the world yet I couldn’t help but notice how all the markets would continually chop and change their strategies for it. How could something so popular and well known with the burger-eating public be seemingly not known or understood by the people that market it? So I suggested to the McDonald’s European CMO that, between his 3 roster agencies and his European heads, we should develop and choose a universal strategy for this iconic burger brand and that everyone should then execute to the same brief. This was the insightful and honest direction that my team and I developed and illustrated. The CMO grabbed it like a drowning man but, inevitably, the markets all decided to stick with the strategies their own networks had previously developed. All of which just highlights once again how difficult it is to get any centrally created initiative adopted by the markets, who hold all the power. Agencies need to be smarter about how they solve this.

The idea was to set up a kind of ‘Run London’ for swimmers and would-be swimmers nationwide. This deck focuses on the posters, T-Shirts and swimming caps that I jammed out at the last-minute.

One of life’s trickier briefs – how to get people to holiday in Egypt, despite the troubles faced by the country. Our solution was a) to focus on the Egyptian people and their friendly, quirky ways (not the more attention-grabbing pyramids and Sphinx, etc) and, b) show how this distinctive, inventive spirit refreshes all the usual holiday stereotypes. This deck contains the TV, plus the brand and destination print.