Changing outdated perceptions of British culture

Client
Challenge:
GREAT, the United Kingdom’s global brand and program committed to changing perceptions of Great Britain, hosted a month-long events campaign throughout NYC, showcasing different cornerstones of British culture – food, innovation, sports and music. Consumers gained access to these immersive events by finding iconic red phone booths around NYC that would ring randomly and give tickets when people “answered the call.”
Campaign
AGEAN was responsible for the whole U.S. PR strategy. We created the 2022 British Culture Survey to show the current state of Americans’ misconceptions and leveraged that data to build a story beyond just event press. We concepted a launch video where British celebrities read “mean tweets” about British culture only to debunk them. We secured two exclusives at launch – one print and one social – to tell the full story of the campaign and to drive traffic to the phone booths and we leveraged celebrity chef, Nadiya Hussain to secure multiple national and NYC TV, podcast and print stories showcasing modern British cuisine.

The fully integrated campaign included radio, OOH, social & digital. We brought the best of UK culture to NYC with partnerships: the Premier League, Bompas & Parr, Sofar Sounds for concerts with British rising artists, Nadiya Hussain, Ian Wright and Michael Carrick for the events as well as Gordon Ramsay, Hugh Bonneville, Joan Collins, Dina Asher-Smith for the launch video and social content.
Forbes articles
AdAge

Results:

350 media stories

with 50 media and 12 influencers attending the events.

We generated 1.56 billion earned media impressions

in March 2022 (goal was 800M)

68% of press coverage

was national press for this NYC-based events campaign.

80% of coverage

included ‘changing perceptions’ or ‘breaking old cultural stereotypes' messaging.

100% of coverage

was positive in sentiment.
Influencer Paid Impressions: 12.783M (goal was 3.75M)

90% of coverage

included the URL (goal was 30% with CTA) ---- Traffic to website where consumers could continue to learn about and reassess modern British culture jumped 5,000% during the PR campaign the campaign shifted perceptions from 52% to 62% (up 10 points) that the UK is a place of opportunity today.