Today, we’ve launched Unlimited B2B – a new integrated agency partnership, designed to deliver a complete buyer experience across PR, comms and marketing.
In the new world of communication, the need for all organisations to portray themselves in a consistent manner has never been more important. That means integrating skillsets across strategy, creative, marketing, PR and social media. And when you’re working with multiple separate agencies that don’t talk to each other, that’s extremely hard to do.
Which is why we’ve teamed up with TMW Business – the leading B2B marketers within UNLIMITED, to create Unlimited B2B. We provide our passion for communication and storytelling; they bring marketing creativity and strategy. The result? The complete package for you; Human Understanding, Storytelling and Content Experience, all with the aim of helping B2B buyers to buy.
It’s important to know that this isn’t a rebrand for Nelson Bostock. Our Winning Minds will continue to be here, in their current form. Instead, Unlimited B2B is an overarching agency. We’ve always been brilliant at building brand and belief for our clients – now we can go even further in building business too.
And as always, everything we do will be underpinned by the Human Understanding Lab’s insights, so you can be sure there’s evidence-based science at the heart of your campaigns.
We’re excited to get started with our new colleagues and we hope you are too!
What does modern customer engagement really look like?
Twilio needed an integrated campaign that positioned them as a leader in customer engagement who truly understands customer behaviour.
Approach:
We set out to humanise the topic of customer engagement – explain the issues in terms that people could actually understand, and tie it to current headlines.
How? We commissioned pan-European research to understand the reality and challenges of customer engagement today. We then identified and worked with a preeminent influencer – Professor Andrew Stephen (University of Oxford) – to interpret the insights and shape a customer engagement report).
Keeping cybersecurity news hot on the heels of ransomware attacks.
Sophos had a strong reputation with tech and security press, but to generate awareness of the importance of cybersecurity as a service, they needed to find a way of engaging with national and business press.
Approach
The press office monitored the news agenda to identify relevant new stories as soon as they broke – such as ransomware attacks, cybersecurity regulation, and cyber warfare – and pitched insights and interviews from Sophos experts.
Our team directly reached out to Sophos researchers, experts, and communications professionals to develop commentary at speed, using a follow-the-sun approach to connect experts with the press at any point of the day.
And, by using a bank of existing, approved insights the team could respond rapidly to news or create bespoke commentary as needed.
How can we make money-mute SMEs talk payment terms?
GoCardless wanted to reach new SME audiences and position themselves as a leading voice about the vitally important – but well-trodden – issue of late payments.
Approach:
We commissioned YouGov to discover the scale of money muteness amongst SMEs. We found that 25% feel uncomfortable talking to customers about money, rising to 32% for women.
We partnered with Emma Gannon, a Sunday Times bestselling author and host of the podcast Ctrl Alt Delete, who often discusses the issue of late payments amongst fellow SME owners.
Our objective was to build Toshiba a new EU website that showcased their Quantum Technology Division. The site had to be dynamic, with all-new messaging, product information, and the ability to publish more content, more often.
Approach:
We created an entirely new website that highlighted the Toshiba quantum proposition. From developing a completely customised site in WordPress, with an updated design and multiple dynamic elements, to writing every single webpage.
We developed brand proposition messaging – from scratch! – and integrated SEO to ensure a highly-competitive output that would rank highly on search engines, while having the flexibility to update with new content as and when updates and developments happened.
Giving families the power to make high-definition memories.
Canon wanted to drive media awareness of their smart camera to target tech-savvy families that could benefit from the camera’s intelligent functionality.
Approach:
Many families want to capture all-important candid memories, but often struggle to both get everyone in the shot and stay in the moment. We proposed the idea of a hands-on baking event for lifestyle press that would allow us to generate highly visual earned coverage, and demonstrate the use-case of the camera. We created a toolkit that allowed markets across EMEA to roll out the activity and delivered the execution within the UK. The initiative generated coverage across all of Canon’s target markets.
In 2017, we started to work with the (now) Cisco ThousandEyes – a network intelligence solution and the “X-Ray machine of the Internet” – who needed to create a strong UK profile.
Approach:
We developed a varied thought leadership campaign, including corporate profiling and creative storytelling, to raise awareness of ThousandEyes’ expertise.
We secured regular national and business briefings and coverage with The Times, Daily Telegraph, CNBC Europe, Mail Online, Evening Standard, The Independent, and many more – as well as opinion pieces in a broad spectrum of top-tier trade and vertical media.
Can a smart TV take the place of a football stadium experience?
In the run-up to the delayed EURO 2020 football tournament, Toshiba wanted to promote the brand’s range of smart TVs to football fans with families.
We discovered family football fans over-index on watching sports together with friends and family in the pub or at live events (like fan parks) – it was one of their key passion points.
In 2021, with lockdown and restrictions in place, this wouldn’t be possible…
Approach:
We launched a nationwide competition across Toshiba’s social channels asking football fans to nominate their friends and family to find the country’s biggest supporters.
The prize? – the ultimate back garden fan park, complete with a purpose-built bar, food truck for on-demand pizza, stadium seating to replicate the match-day experience, inflatable football games for the family, confetti cannons to boost the celebrations, and, of course, a big screen Toshiba smart 4K HDR TV.
Successful hybrid working requires a lot of tech – how can we make Canon the go-to for all of it?
Our brief was to encourage potential customers to see value in Canon’s hybrid working ‘ecosystem’, rather than opting for individual product purchases.
Approach:
On the face of it, a campaign focusing on IT processes and procurement strategies can be pretty dull… Not the way we do things.
We created a story-led, creative-first campaign highlighting the struggles modern distributed teams face, and how Canon’s technologies solve them. All the content was delivered in just nine weeks.
This full-funnel campaign was activated across 14 EMEA regions and included:
a unique, hand-drawn Canon comic book strip
three SEO and keyword-optimised Q&A articles featuring Canon experts
a top-of-funnel infographic
a fully managed, multi-region paid and organic social campaign
internal and external-facing product presentations
The official theme for 2023 is “Strength in Solidarity” – inviting us all to celebrate not only the power and resilience of the LGBTQIA+ community, but also the incredible positive change that can be made by uniting together.
In a world where platforms of hatred and violence are upheld and often even celebrated, Pride seeks to illuminate the good that can, and has been, accomplished by those uplifting and supporting one another.
With this in mind, our DEI committee asked our colleagues to name and celebrate the voices of LGBTQIA+ people who have inspired them, highlighting the ‘queeroes’ who have impacted our lives…
My ‘queero’ is probably novelist Sarah Waters, whose works often feature lesbian protagonists/storylines (Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, etc.). She’s an amazing writer who brings queer love stories to the masses.
Marsha P. Johnson was one of the most influential figures in the Stonewall uprising[HM1] that transformed the queer liberation movement in the twentieth century. That ‘riot’ is also sometimes cited as ‘the first pride’, since the marches take place every year in June to mark the anniversary. In short, without Marsha, there would be no pride! She is definitely a queero.
Poet & activist Audre Lorde (1934-1992) dedicated her life to challenging racism, sexism, and homophobia – describing herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” I remember reading “Sister Outsider” when I was in university, and it had a dramatic impact on me – particularly her radical self-acceptance (which felt totally alien), and her commitment to intersectional activism. Throughout her life, she inspired generations to fight against all forms of oppression, reminding us that, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” She is one of the 50 pioneers inducted on the National LGBTQ+ Wall of Honour within the Stonewall National Monument.
Samo is an artist from Southsea. I met Samo years ago when he ran PlayDead studio, a gallery space used to raise the profile of local and emerging artists. Playdead sadly closed during the pandemic, so Samo now uses art and activism to educate and celebrate trans lives. He also uses his Instagram to tell his personal, frank and moving experience of gender transition.
Tom Daley has been a leading light for the LGBTQ+ community in the sports sector. Recently, Tom released a documentary called ‘Illegal To Be Me’, in which Tom took a journey to some of the Commonwealth’s most homophobic countries to ask what the sporting world can do to help. The film culminates with Tom taking a very public stand at this year’s opening ceremony, in a powerful statement against homophobia. Tom has provided a manifesto to the Commonwealth Games Federation, written with contributions from LGBT+ people across the Commonwealth, to create meaningful, long-lasting change that ensures major sporting competitions are open to, and safe for, everyone.
Magnus Hirschfield was a German sexologist and an outspoken supporter of LGBTQ+ rights during the Nazi era. He is best known for his subsequent theory of sexual intermediaries, which held that there were many types of naturally occurring sexual variations found across the human population, such as hermaphroditism, homosexuality, and transvestism. In 1897 Hirschfeld established the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee with Max Spohr, Franz Josef von Bülow, and Eduard Oberg; it was the world’s first gay rights organisation. Its main goal was to fight for the abolishment of Paragraph 175 of the German Imperial Penal Code, which punished sexual contact between men. In 1919 Hirschfeld opened the first sexology institute in the world, the Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin; the institute and the considerable holdings of its library and archives were destroyed by Nazi demonstrators in 1933. In 1934 he fled to Switzerland with the remains of his archive and the queer family he formed at his Institute.
Today, the LGBTQ+ victims of the Nazi regime are remembered by the Pink Triangle symbol. The pink triangle was originally sewn onto the shirts of LGBTQ+ people to identify and further dehumanise them. However, in the 1970s, activists reclaimed the symbol as one of liberation.
Jessica is a YouTuber and online influencer who (in her own words): adds “vintage lesbian fabulousness to a life with disabilities and chronic illnesses.” Her content is educational and uplifting, with some regular series (like ‘Queer History 101’) delving deeper into certain terms, historical moments, and notable figures.
Ocean is a poet & novelist who won the T. S. Eliot prize in 2017. He writes about his experience of life as a gay refugee in America – but also about relationships, and what it’s like to lose your mother, or survive a war. Reading his work is like listening to a friend who really gets you – I recommend everyone going through a tough time reads ‘Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong’!
