Last year (2020) we won 20 awards for our work across PR, creative and social media. I thought that was very impressive.

This year we won 45.

Without a doubt, this has been one of the best performing years at Rise at Seven, with campaigns teams being built out, a dedicated newsjacking offering, a new social team and working with some of the best brands. Despite a pandemic, fast growth and lots of new hires, there’s two things we refuse to lose: creativity and speed. To prove it, here’s some of the best creative, 360, digital PR, social or influencer campaigns we’ve delivered for clients in 2021:

1. Masked hoodie with PrettyLittleThing

We started off the year in January with a product development campaign for PrettyLittleThing. The amount of times we headed to Sainsburys for a loaf of bread, and shout “F**K!” when we realised we forgot that all important mask was getting out of hand, and we needed a fix. Well, there’s a solution!

Hoodies were one of the top trending products of 2021, alongside the loungewear trend of lockdown. Searches were up drastically, and we needed to capitalise on this trend. After working with the product development teams, a masked hoodie was created. Several thousand units were produced in the hope they would be a sell out.

And they were! Our PR team pushed the masked hoodie out to the media, landing 40+ placements/links on Heat Mag, Daily Mail, OK! magazine and more. 12K people visited the product page as a result of the digital PR strategy, organically making it a sell out product in a matter of weeks. Demand was increasing, therefore extra products were launched including a dress, roll neck top and more - all including a built-in face mask.

Product Development campaigns are something we run regularly at Rise at Seven across all industries from Fashion, Beauty, Travel and more. They not only drive brand and product PR, but sales too! You see so many brands doing the ‘sold out’ tactic (not actually creating the product) but this was actually real.

2. Haribo ring with Taylor and Hart

Our creative and PR teams launched The World’s First Diamond Encrusted Haribo Engagement Ring with bespoke jewellery retainer Taylor and Hart. After analysing internal search data and the weird and wonderful bespoke jewellery enquiries across the years, something stood out… Requests for a real life Haribo ring! So, we decided to literally give people what they wanted, and worked with the team to create a 24 carat diamond ring, designed and shaped just like a Haribo ring.

We launched the campaign organically across press and social, driving 89 links back to the site. This drove 8,500 people to the landing page and brought in 37 enquiries to buy the ring. To put it into perspective, the ring costs £25K to buy. The campaign paid for itself!

Haribo shared the campaign on their social channels engaging with our activity, which led to a total of over 500K social impressions.

We grew Taylor and Hart’s referring domains by 235% over a 6 month period, resulting in a 280% traffic increase to engagement rings as a category YoY.

3. Interflora International Women's Day

International Women’s Day was around the corner for Interflora, and as a way to celebrate women, women in business, and how far (or not) we have come for equality, our creative team came up with an idea to visualise women’s equality statistics using flower bouquets. This concept was turned into a landing page, creative ads for social, and even designed for OOH. We visualised stats such as 1 in 20 CEOs are women, and that 75% of the NHS are women, too.

Read more here.

4. Normalising flowers for dads on Father's Day

In a mission to drive brand awareness and growth online, we went big with Interflora. This was our second campaign we launched with them - and quite possibly one of my favourites. Our data team pulled some insight around Father’s Day, including the most popular searches around that time. It was clear that buying presents for your dad is so much harder than other family members. Do you go for socks, Lynx, beer? Well, what about flowers? A shocking headline revealed the truth behind gifting flowers to dads and men overall, stating “Most men receive flowers for the first time at their own funerals.”

We knew we needed to change this. Search demand for flowers on Father’s Day was extremely low, so we had a challenge on our hands. We had to promote Interflora, land some links and media placements, but more importantly make flowers for Father’s Day an actual search demand. How do we do that? A campaign which normalises gifting flowers to men!

We launched an influencer campaign where we captured the moments men were seen being gifted flowers. These moments were captured and turned into Instagram reels, TikToks, and extra social content for the brands channels.

They were seeded out across both the brand channels and influencer channels, and used PR to land media placements, too. The campaign was seen by over 300,000 people, and drove 2,900 people organically to the flowers for Father’s Day category we created, generating a five figure revenue for the brand.

Even better, this was the search demand for Father’s Day flowers this year vs. the previous year, showing a 62% increase in demand.

5. The Sole Concept for Sole Supplier

Concepts are massive amongst the sneakerhead community. Real or ‘inspired by’, they go viral regularly. But in true Rise fashion, we didn’t want to just create one concept, we wanted to create a whole range, and we needed a place to host them: The Sole Concept.

Our creative team executed the creation of sneaker concepts, which fans can vote on to influence the next big sneaker production relevant to pop culture right now. The concepts featured Disney, gaming, Universities, Superhero and more, with a new design concept coming out every couple of months. Each concept had its own target media list and custom social audience that we were targeting through paid ads, ensuring we could build links from different niches and drive traffic from different passions.

The concepts landed 61 links on top tier media from Hype Fresh, GQ, Inquirer and Rolling Stone. The concepts have driven 23K page views globally.

6. Inception for US flight website Next Vacay

For the 11th Anniversary of Inception, we decided to visualise what major US cities would look like using an Inception-like imagination. From LA to Portland, our creative team put together some mind bending imagery that made you feel inquisitive and uneasy at the same time.

No data. Just creative.

The campaign picked up over 30 links from US regional press like ksat.com, and movie sites such as Screenrant.

7. Squid game drives White Vans for Sole Supplier

Through our very own Early Risers tool, where we track trending search behaviour, we were notified of a 7,000% increase in demand for white vans following the viral Squid Game launch on Netflix. Sales of the vans increased by over 7,500% overnight, alongside green tracksuits too. We used this data to put our clients products (white vans) at the centre of the conversation, pushing the data and products to press alongside social activity. In the space of 24 hours, 662 media placements/links were built on some of the biggest media worldwide, including Variety, Vogue, HypeBeast, NME, Paper Mag and more.

8. Autoglass - Reactive

Did you see Marmites’ creative OOH billboard going viral on social earlier this year? It featured a Marmite lid crashed onto a car, and the internet went wild for it.

However, it looked like they needed some help! We reacted to the stunt in the space of 45 minutes, ‘sending’ Autoglass to check out the screen. Autoglass virtually turned up to the scene and sent the internet wild again. We put this brand at the centre of a trending conversation, and generated over 1 million views and a tweet from Marmite themselves about it.

9. Bernie Sanders - IKEA Ad

Another reactive special from our reactive marketing team, the Bernie Sanders image was spreading across the internet, trending for over a week with brands jumping on the conversation to drive engagement. We reacted at speed, creating a fake social ad for IKEA renaming their low cost folding chair to Bernië. A simple post on LinkedIn and Twitter sent it viral, generating over 1.2 million views for the brand.

Interesting, IKEA Germany posted a very similar ad at the same time – great minds think alike!

10. Sunflower hotel for Interflora

This summer, staycations in the UK were up 400%. So much so that hotel and Airbnb prices HIKED, and it was near impossible to get booked into anywhere special. Unique stays were therefore in demand – a special stay, with a gorgeous view, instagram worthy decor and ofcourse a hot tub was more popular than ever.

We therefore decided to solve this problem, launching the world’s first sunflower hotel by Interflora. We covered an off-grid lodge in over 1,000 sunflower heads, with sunflower interior and decor, and more. The campaign started off as a competition on social media to win a night’s stay there and then the public could join in along with journalist trips, too.

The campaign landed over 70+ media placements/links.

11. Launching The PrettyLittleThing Hotel

Rise at Seven may as well expand into the hospitality industry, because next up was our campaign launching The Pretty Little Thing Hotel. Pretty Little Thing was looking for a large brand building campaign alongside the Digital PR work we were doing. A campaign which would drive social engagement, email sign ups and media coverage. The campaign was run in order to promote their new homeware range, including cushions, bed sheets and candles.

With press launch days, social competitions, social content and PR, this campaign drove 50 links to the site, driving 55K traffic to the landing page.

12. pCloud's Invasive Apps

For a lot of our B2B tech clients, creating link worthy, share worthy content through data studies, and positioning them as experts in the field, is a way to build brand awareness and land in some of the biggest publications on the internet. This campaign was exactly that. We created a simple data study, which looked at which apps track your personal data and what they share with third party apps. It landed the most media placements and links this year in one single go. This data visualisation landed 972 links Tech Crunch, PC mag, Gizmodo, Independent and Today.com. 67,000 people visited the content onsite organically, all through PR activity. Blog traffic was up 230% as a result of this activity which we continued across a year. The visual resulted in 20K social shares and reached people in 36 countries.

13. Money.co.uk reveal the healthiest places to live

This simple data campaign ranks every country worldwide on obesity rates, pollution, food prices, life expectancy, and sunlight hours to find the healthiest places to live, as many are emigrating to new locations.

The content piece was the best performing campaign of the year for the client, resulting in 217 media placements across 23 countries, 94% of those being new refering domains.

14. The Rock with My Baggage

A PR stunt for My Baggage US, we made it seem like The Rock became available to help you move internationally, offering his services to carry the big stuff. The Digital PR campaign was a huge success, landing 40+ media placements/links and even 89 conversions for bookings.

15. Harry Styles Spa with SpaSeekers

Themed spas are our thing, and a foolproof way to drive media coverage and bookings. As a part of a strategy to promote specific spa hotels, we launched a Harry Styles inspired Watermelon Sugar themed spa evening. Including ‘Breathe me in’ scented candle massage sessions, ‘Adore you’ skin facials, Harry Styles on playlists and his very own scent in candles, the whole themed experience drove people wild. The campaign landed 88 media placements on publications including Billboard, Vogue, Time Out, and 34 special guests even tested it out for real.

16. SOS Hotspots with Next Vacay

SOS and HELP messages appeared on the sands of the most struggling beach destinations around the world – oh yeah, that was us!

Covid hit the tourism industry hard, and we wanted a campaign that visualised that and also could help the hardest hit places get back on their feet. This campaign combined data on the hardest hit places in terms of money lost from tourism, and creative in the form of a hero video showing locals of these areas writing SOS and HELP messages in the sand of famous beaches. The campaign was pushed to press, and used paid social to promote it. So far, it has landed 53 pieces of links, including Washington Post, CNBC and Business Insider.

17. Outages with Websitetooltester

Website outages are one of the most talked about topics in tech media, with Black Friday being a huge impact, Twitter going down time and time again and Whatsapp crashing millions of conversations worldwide. So, we created a piece of content ranking the world’s biggest apps by outages, and landed in over 120 media links - including Guardian, Forbes, CityAM and more.

18. Tiktok Top for PrettyLittleThing

The halterneck was one of the biggest fashion trends of summer 2021- that’s because we created it! One of my favourite innovative campaigns proves how search demand can be created and create fast fashiontrends too. This campaign took a product PLT already ranked number 1 for and made it trend on TikTok using influencers across the world. The aim? To drive search demand. Search demand went up 850%, 45,000 people visited the halterneck category organically as a result Press coverage and links were in the hundreds, and we even won an award for innovation in social media.

19. boohooMAN NFT

Yes that's right, we launched the NFT collection for BoohooMAN. Stats and results are flying in, but right now we're still going …

20. Chill Insurance Christmas driving songs

And last of all, tracking the BPM of famous Xmas songs. We discovered which festive jingle was most likely to cause dangerous driving for Chill Insurance. It’s spread like wildfire in the US, landing on six TV news stations and gaining plenty of links (62 and counting) on both sides of the pond.

We have run over 100 campaigns, strategies, and executions in the last year - and this is just a short summary of some of our faves from all areas. Get in touch if you like what you see, our next big campaign could be for you.