We Made It! The Cow 2021 End of Year Review

2021 has been quite the year. Despite the unique challenges of lockdown, reopening and during those heady summer and autumnal days of freedom we’ve managed to deliver one of our best years ever.

We won the PR Week Global Award for Best Creative Idea and picked up the PR Week Award for Best Healthcare campaign for the second year in a row for INTIMINA and Best Brand Experience and Best Virtual Experience for The Kraken. How can we top that? Well…

We launched Heineken’s Official partnership for the UEFA Euros 2020 with Robbie Savage pranking Rio Ferdinand; took over a derelict hotel in Lancaster Gate for The Kraken’s Dread and Breakfast; opened a ready meal restaurant for Asda; addressed the eight year wait for an endometriosis diagnosis with a cast of 8-year-olds for INTIMINA and made ‘the world’s worst toy’ for World Animal Protection during COP26.

We’ve welcomed many new Cows to the herd, expanded our client offering and added some amazing new clients such as Asda, Metro Bank, The Luna Cinema, Virgin Pure and Warner’s gin. It’s been tough at times, but it’s been worth it and could only have been accomplished with all the team pulling together and the support of our amazing clients. Here are just some of the highlights as we run through 2021.

To mark a year of lockdown, we worked with Heineken 0.0 to come to the aid of people who wanted a beer while they worked at home without losing their focus or having to leave their Zoom meet. Introducing the Wind0.0w delivery service – launched with the Queen of Quarantine, Sophie Ells Bextor.

The awards season got off to an impressive start when our Period x Pantone campaign for INTIMINA won Global Creative Idea of the Year at the PR Week Global Awards. Yes, most creative idea in the world and Period would go on to pick up a dozen major awards across 2021, including The Drum's PR Campaign of The Year.

Who doesn't love a bit of print? As the nation prepared to reopen for outdoor gyms, pools and sports clubs, we owned the conversation for David Lloyd Clubs with front pages on both The Times and The Daily Telegraph. A splash, literally.

To celebrate Heineken as an Official Partner for UEFA Euros 2020 and being ‘Back together, to be rivals again’, we staged two pranks on England legends Rio Ferdinand and Jermaine Jenas – with help from Welshman Robbie Savage and Scotsman Ally McCoist. Featured in PR Week’s 11 Campaigns we liked in 2021, the cheeky stunts generated 43 pieces of national coverage and 9m social views across three weeks of the tournament.

For new client Luna Cinema, we produced a VIP, invite-only screening of Top Gun at Kensington Palace attended by over 250 celebrities, media and influencers and their pals.

To support those hit hardest by the pandemic, we created Generation Ale with Brixton Brewery and Age UK Lambeth. It was launched with an epic feature on ITV London News.

The worlds of street fashion and tequila collided when we developed a collab between Daniel Cordas x 1800 Tequila with a destination event in Soho that was FULL of sneaker heads and urban style influencers for an entire weekend.

Still on tequila, and that’s no bad thing, we produced The Tequila Tap Room pop-up for Jose Cuervo. That’s right, the bar serving tequila cocktails on tap over two packed out weekends in London and Bristol. No one was more surprised than us when a) Massive Attack turned up at the latter and b) helped to provide a bit of extra security.

To celebrate the pioneering work of the Institute of Cancer Research, we worked with artist Rosalind Wyatt to transform three of their scientist’s lab coats into works of art. Each coat incorporated words and drawings provided by patients and their families with hard to treat cancers with moving results.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Asda’s Extra Special range we launched the world’s first Ready Meal Restaurant. Serving Extra Special ready meals plated with Michelin Star presentation, the pop-up was fully booked with 200 covers.

To deliver our best ever Screamfest live event for The Kraken, we transformed a derelict hotel in London for one weekend. Introducing Dread & Breakfast – the first hotel where guests were guaranteed to NOT get a good night’s sleep. A blend of cocktails, live music and immersive theatre, over 400 guests attended the sold-out event with some unlucky ones getting an overnight stay.

Sticking to Screamfest and back to awards. In October 2020, we had to abort a live event and turn Screamfest into a virtual one. The response was an innovative, In Real Life, first person video game: The Kraken’s Revenge (where players got to control Game of Thrones star Iwan Rheon from their locked down homes). The concept was SO AWESOME and so popular it won the PR Moment award for Best Virtual Event and The Drum Experience award for Best at Home Experience.

At the PR Week Awards we won our second consecutive Healthcare Campaign of the Year award.?Period with INTIMINA x Pantone also won two High Commendations and was a worthy follow up to our Taking a Stanza winning work with the ICR in 2020.

To coincide with COP26 we put animal welfare and agricultural emissions on the news agenda and all-over social media timelines. Welcome to Factory Farm Playset, the ‘world’s worst toy’. Working with World Animal Protection, our campaign film showed what happened when a group of young children were introduced to it, with inspiring results. Factory Farm Play Set was selected by PR Week for the Best of COP26 and joined Dread and Breakfast in Creative Moment’s Best Creative Work of 2021.

Our Future of the Hight Street report with Metro Bank and leading consumer futurist Will Higham revealed how a return to the Tudor roots of commerce, AI and hyper-local community could hold the key to the future and was covered in the likes of City AM and the Financial Times.

It takes an average of eight years for women to be diagnosed with endometriosis. Working with Intimina we were determined to elevate the issue. The result was a powerful film called The Wait where the experiences of real women were conveyed by 8-year-old children. The disruptive campaign gave a voice to women suffering in silence and helped put the issue on the national media agenda.

And then, there was us. We had to take a few deep breaths, pull together, give 2021 our best shot and we made it. We didn’t get to have a Christmas party thanks to Omicron BUT we did have our annual summer Cow barbecue at Sian’s house. Look at those happy faces.

Finally, there is you. You made it to the end of this post! If you worked with us it was a blast; if you haven’t and you like what you’ve seen, please get in touch. Merry Christmas and have a happy new year. It HAS to be better than the one we’ve just had, right. Right?