Business ideas for creatives. Creative ideas for businesses.
As a communications strategist I have advised clients including Diageo, British Airways, BMW, Sky TV and Medecins Sans Frontieres for 30 years.
I have worked at Unilever, where I created the first global content strategy for Persil/Dirt is Good. I spent time at O2 designing its short-lived smart home proposition.
My consultancy currently focusses on the intersection of business and creativity.
If you run a small creative business, I can help focus your messaging, rationalise your product mix or advise on partnerships.
If you are not a small creative enterprise, here are some examples of tangible contributions I could make to your business:
Are you a CMO? Do you need a content strategy? A business-data-driven marketing plan? Cover while you take a sabbatical?
For creative agencies, I can provide short term/interim strategic support for pitches or parental leave or simply an injection of thinking on a thorny problem.
Creative Directors, do you need ideas for content formats? I devised a Persil’s first multi-market content strategy and briefed for content formats that were in use for over ten years.
Scroll down for a few past highlights.
RateSetter
RateSetter was a peer-to-peer investment and loan firm. Before COVID-19 killed the business, I ran the marketing team. Entirely in-house, we redefined the brand and developed activity to capitalise on ISA season that included print advertising, search, social, programmatic, CRM plus a commissioned news-friendly consumer research and segmentation project.
Médecins Sans Frontières
MSF challenged us to help make charity-fatigued individuals in US and Europe care about unfair vaccine pricing in developing nations, an issue that affected people thousands of miles away.
Our solution was to dramatise the issue in ways that were relevant to life closer to home.
Domestos / World Toilet Day
I worked at Unilever planning communications for a handful of global brands. The Domestos team wanted to promote their charity-partner’s fundraising day. How do we get people who take their amazing sanitation system for granted to empathise with those who don’t have any sanitation at all?
My brief to the agency was make the invisible visible.
The solution was Flushtracker, a web app that showed where your flush went in real time.
The app was widely shared on twitter and Facebook, received coverage on Irish TV and Absolute (national) Radio. The first and perhaps only time that Domestos has had a viral moment.
If you’d like to learn more, please get in touch: hello@patricksyms.com