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An alien invader meets a heroic general and they discover they both love the emotional roller coaster of soap operas. A pickpocket and a dapper lord enjoy a murder procedural together. “Those tweed jackets really are to die for, aren’t they?” the lord comments. A vampire hunter staves off a vampire’s attack by redirecting his attention to a live football match. And a police squad delays arresting a gang of robbers to watch the finale of Strictly Come Dancing together.

All of these scenarios are part of Red Bee Creative’s new campaign for the BBC and TV Licensing, reminding viewers that “nothing brings us together like great TV.”

Red Bee Executive Creative Director Charlie Mawer joined Spotlight to tell us everything about how Red Bee crafted the campaign in tandem with brand strategy agency RAPP and some of Britain’s most prominent talent. 

‍Spotlight: I’m fairly sure most of my readers know what Red Bee is, but just in case people don’t know, give me a brief summary of what Red Bee is and what it does.

‍Mawer: We are a global entertainment marketing agency and we offer three things to clients: strategy, campaigns and design work. We work with clients all over the world, albeit we are headquartered in London. 70% of our work comes from the United States, Europe, Australia, Middle East, really anywhere!

We are an agency born in TV because we were the in-house creative department at the BBC and we were then sold off in 2005. That was when Red Bee was created, we’re now in our 20th anniversary year. 

From that background, it is not surprising that we do a lot of work with public service broadcasters: France Télévisions, RTE in Ireland,  NRK, ABC in Australia. We’ve got public service in our blood but we don’t normally do lots of work with the BBC anymore. The campaign we’re going to talk about today is sort of the exception. 

‍Spotlight: OK, let’s get into that. You worked with strategy agency RAPP on this campaign for the UK’s TV Licensing department. Explain TV licensing to me because we don’t have that in the U.S. 

‍Mawer: TV Licensing is a department within the BBC that is responsible for the promotion and collection of the TV license. In the UK, you need a broadcast TV license to watch any live TV channel. Money from the TVL pays for the BBC but you need one to watch any live linear channel or BBC iPlayer. In the ads, we are talking about the power of great TV to bring people together. That's genuinely all of TV, because it's not just the BBC that does that.

The campaign was briefed to be about the value of the TV license and to move from it being transactional to talk about the value of what great TV does, which is what you get when the final of The Traitors in the UK is watched by 10 million people across all demos, or the final of Strictly Come Dancing is watched by 11 million-plus people. Broadcast TV brings people together in a way that all of us watching a different show at different times on other platforms can’t do.

The brief was really about the value that you get from this incredible medium. The campaign was a real investment in British talent. The BBC is a powerhouse within the creative industry in the UK. It creates IP that is being sold around the world. 

‍Spotlight: Did the brief just ask for a campaign that promoted the value of the TV license or did it go into the level of detail that we see in the finished campaign? 

‍Mawer: The brief was very much about the topline value of the TV license. Our creative leap ran off the back of a previous campaign that had been running for about four years that also paid homage to different TV genres. The campaign demonstrates passion for the creative vehicle. If you can bring together quintessential heroes and villains or anti-heros, well, every drama lies in opposition. If you can bring them together then you can bring anyone together to watch a great TV program. 

From that first thought of antagonists and protagonists we got to this idea that you can take almost any genre and find those characters. From there, we went to cops and robbers and evil alien lords and heroic military generals defending planet Earth. You can almost take any genre and find those characters.

That idea helped frame it. Each spot is only 30-40 seconds long so you need to establish the characters really quickly -- like vampire and vampire hunter. Live sports is the subject of the fourth piece. Streamers are starting to show an interest in live sports but they still very much represent a live linear moment, in the way the Super Bowl is for Americans.

‍RAPP worked collaboratively with the client as we were presenting scripts back. They are a lovely agency to work with. This idea is one of three or four roots we presented and the client loved it from the first. The idea went through audience research and it got a good thumbs up. 

‍Spotlight: How long did you have to produce this campaign? 

‍Mawer: From brief to air date, probably six months.  

It was really important to back British talent. We had this incredible director, David Kerr from Hungry Man, who was in between doing two Rowan Atkinson comedies, he also did a comedy drama called Stags for Paramount Plus. We worked with him years ago. He’s a really funny director with a great way with talent. We also worked with some of the best of homegrown talent behind the screens, from the editor of the Paddington films, Mark Everson; the costume designer on Wolf Hall, Joanna Eatwell; Academy award-winning sound designers at Wave Studios, and industry leading VFX house Rascal. 

We also worked with the Sara Crowe casting agency to secure the talent. That agency is brilliant, and does a lot of mainstream comedy and drama rather than advertising. It was interesting to them to think about doing very short form and they had a very good feel for who was available. We put in requests and more often than not we got the people we wanted. A lot of them got their first breaks from the BBC so they had a lot of love for what the BBC and TV licensing represents. Someone like Tim McInnerny, who was just coming off of doing Gladiator II, or Ralph Ineson, who was coming from doing Nosferatu, yet they’ve got a real loyalty and interest in the BBC. We also had Darren Boyd, Jing Lusi, Luke Pasqualino, Emma Appleton,Rosie Day, Marc Warren and Pearl Mackie. I hope they also came on board because they liked the scripts.

Spotlight: Who wrote the scripts? 

‍Mawer: Red Bee wrote the scripts and they didn’t change a lot in production, but they did change on the day of filming. We sometimes had alternate lines, and so we would just try something on set.

I think it’s a real trust thing and sometimes you just feel it in the recording. 

‍Spotlight: Why did you want David Kerr for this shoot? 

‍Mawer: I’d shot a campaign with him in 2008 or 2009 and he just always struck me as someone who was really good in the rehearsal room, good at talking about the scripts with talent, good at getting the beats right. Miraculously it was the right moment, he was coming out of post in one job so we had a little window. 

One of the things I would say is that we were actually looking for long-form comedy and drama directors rather than commercial directors because we wanted to try to capture the rhythm and the shot sizes, everything that would make you feel like you were in that world.

‍Spotlight: You added voiceovers from famous actors – Kelly MacDonald, Saoirse Monica- Jackson, Kimberley Nixon and Helen Baxendale – from each of the four countries in the UK – Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England. How did that work? 

‍Mawer: There are four spots and the voiceover artists change for each spot. For example, if you are seeing the campaign in Scotland you’ll hear Kelly McDonald. It was a way of working with diverse British talent. You need to be conscious of diversity at all times. We work a lot with Telemundo in the U.S. and we understand that the HIspanic community there is not a single entity – it’s rich and diverse. That’s the same with the UK. You want to show as much diversity as possible. 

‍Spotlight: Where will these all air and for how long?

‍Mawer: The intention is that it’s going to run for three years across all of the BBC platforms as well as on some commercial channels and social platforms. It’s not so much a heavyweight campaign, it’s more like a constant always-on presence that’s about long-term brand building. There is also loads of fun social content that was shot with the talent as well. We produced a huge number of deliverables. Hopefully, it’s a real value for the money.