Another year in the land of Hope&Glory has come and is about to go. So it’s a good time to take a look back at all that the year has brought us …

As has become tradition across agency-land it’s time for a quick look back on the year that has been. We rarely take the chance to look back at what we’ve done – too busy moving on to the next client, the next campaign. Which is largely as it should be.

But still, it does us good to look back at (a small proportion) of the work that went out the door during the year we’re about to close …

We kicked the year off in considerable style with the launch of the Greggs x Primark apparel range. From a cheeky tease with Greggs goodies adorning the mannequins in Primark windows to an all-out media assault to announce the collection to a pop-up street-style boutique the collection cleaned-up across the media.

From there to work with Channel 4 – our first campaign with the brand – which saw us place over 200 pieces with their all-star line-up of Winter Paralympics presenters as the festival of winter sports hit the screens in the first quarter of the year.

We found some time to be named Consumer PR Agency of the Year at the PR Moment Awards 2022 – the annual awards-season kick off event.

From there to The Design Museum who we helped with the launch of their Design of Football Exhibition – with a cheeky spot of content and a hard-working media campaign that brought in the crowds.

Team Uber never has a quiet year. This time around it was the announcement of Uber Pet – enabling riders to be able to book a dog-friendly car with a simple photo story that once again made headlines across the country and got pooches into rides.

It was back on the awards road with a trip to the Sabre Awards where we picked up a host of gongs for work with O2, IKEA, GUINNESS, Sony, Netflix, The Royal Mint and Uber. Oh, and we were named EMEA Creative Agency of the Year at the same event. It was a pretty good night all-round.

As the football season started to wind down we worked with American Express to create their first ever Shirt Swap – offering new-season kits in return for donations of kit from the previous ten years. A neat way of landing the fact that Amex has sponsored the team for ten years while helping bring down the cost of a new shirt.

Team Buzz Bingo grabbed a slice of royal action with the Jubilee – creating that age-old PR favourite a cake of a celebrity (in this case HM The Queen). There were double-pages all-round for the team as the red tops fell in love with the royal confection.

The early summer saw us work on what we look back on as our most important campaign this year – the launch of The Last Photo with CALM. The campaign delivered hundreds of pieces of coverage but most importantly it got people talking about the topic of suicide and the fact that it doesn’t always look suicidal.

For our next campaign we moved on to Netflix and a rather weird piece of work to promote Man vs Bee (the surprise smash-hit of the summer). Creating Growin’ Atkinsons we built homes for the insects across central cities and had a lot of fun along the way.

From there we moved swiftly on to Maltesers and the launch of the “Dark Side” Bakery. Offering cakes with the stunningly honest messages that people really wanted to send we cleaned-up across the media and created a genuine queue of consumers eager to explore their dark sides to mark the launch of dark Maltesers.

Back into awards season and – though we do say so ourselves – we absolutely cleaned-up. There were five awards at the PRCA Awards with work for GUINNESS and Bumble given the nod. As it happened we picked up the Grand Prix on the night for our Cyberflashing campaign. Meantime the same work did rather well at PR Week too with a show-stopping four awards on the big night.

From there to a partnership campaign bringing Powerleague and Uber together. We realised that women’s participation in football tends to drop as the nights draw in so, in the wake of the England Women’s successes, we committed to offer free rides home for players. Simple and yet hugely effective.

The summer saw us host hundreds of media and thousands of fans at the Pokemon World Championships in London. Originally slated to take place pre-pandemic, the oft-postponed and highly anticipated event took over the city and we made sure that it was unmissable for its week-long stay.

All the while, Stateside we brought the final element of Jim Beam’s global partnership with Muse to a close with an epic-scale gig at their Distillery. Hosting media from around the world it closed-out our biggest global campaign to date in considerable style.

From sublime to ridiculous we kicked-off work with Prezzo for whom, in a post-Love Island hazy glow, we launched Davide Dates. The man himself prepared and served Tiramisu to couples who wanted to make their relationships official and the media went nuts in response.

Talking of gastronomic experiences that sent the media and public alike into a spin we create the Greggs Bottomless Brunch to mark the launch of this year’s Festive Bake. Always a major moment in the festive calendar we ensured that everyone was once again talking about the brand as our pop-up weekend events went off nationwide.

Pacing ourselves to the end of the year we worked with Powerleague (as a client rather than as a partner) to help them launch World Cup haircuts (ahead of a certain national newspaper which was clearly inspired by our idea). From a Ronaldo to a Foden, fans could recreate hirsute sporting history.

Sticking with a footballing theme we had the privilege to work with adidas and #Merky Foundation on the launch of #Merky FC – a multi-year partnership that will see a lack of off-pitch representation addressed with opportunities on offer to young Black people and those of Black Mixed-Race Heritage.

It was back on with the gladrags and off to the awards shows to find that we were named Sabre Awards Global Creative Agency of the Year by Provoke and then to see our Bumble campaign once again pick up Best in Show, this time at The Drum Awards. All of that wrapped-up with hearing that PR Week named us the most-awarded UK PR agency (ahead of every global network). Not a bad result.

Before the year wrapped-up there was – as is tradition – plenty of opportunity to get into the festive spirit with our friends at Sainsbury’s. The Pud You Dare pop-up was a hit with the Great British public as we helped the brand campaign to restore people’s love for the humble figgy pudding (sadly neglected by Gen-Z apparently).

And that was before we worked with Guide Dogs on a heart-warming campaign to create the world’s first Visually Impaired-friendly Santa’s Grotto. Not only was it a wonderful campaign to work on from a brand marketing perspective, it was also an opportunity to bring some real joy into the world ahead of the end of another year.

So there you have it. Another year in the land of Hope&Glory has been done and dusted and shown the door. Time for the team to put their feet up and take a well-earned break before we come back bigger and better than ever. Meantime, see you all in 2023.