James Reed

With the UK in a nationwide lockdown, many businesses and employees were faced with a stark reality of mass unemployment. To drive positive action, we supported UK recruitment brand REED, and it’s chairman James Reed, in promoting the ‘Keep Britain Working’ Campaign, at scale.

The objective was singular, REED needed to secure high-quality media coverage to spur action.

We needed to speak to two target audiences when launching; business leaders, and job-seekers and workers. We offered support materials to employees and advice and pledges to business leaders around how they would help keep people in employment.

To do this we developed a media strategy that spanned national, broadcast, HR, recruitment, and business media titles – inviting direct interviews and insight from James Reed and the 15 other business leaders and politicians involved in the campaign. We liaised with a number of these leaders to understand if they were interested in being part of the media outreach. We were able to secure James Timpson who was willing to be interviewed with James Reed about this campaign. This dovetailed with the centralised marketing efforts of the business.

To create maximum impact we placed an exclusive story with The Mail on Sunday before the full campaign launch on Monday morning – which involved a number of broadcast interviews for James Reed and James Timpson to discuss the jobs market, including on Sky News, followed by broad distribution of campaign materials to the wider media.