The Work That Made Me: Hannah Scott

In my first role in media and advertising I would often hear people say that they “fell” into media planning/buying, but I did not. I have always had a real interest and fascination with branding/marketing, and knew it was what I wanted my degree to be in so that I could get a job in the industry. My first role was at Dentsu in the digital media team planning and buying digital media for an array of clients, before making an internal sideways move to The StoryLab which was the media partnerships and sponsorships team, as I wanted to be able to be more creative within my role and broaden my media knowledge across OOH, TV, radio, influencer, print etc. Within this role influencer was just a small part of the media activations that I was doing, but one I thoroughly enjoyed. When I was approached for the role at ITB Worldwide I was unsure if pure influencer was what I wanted to specialise in, but meeting the team, understanding the morals, values and capabilities of ITB, and the clients they worked with, it was a no brainer move for me.

The ad/music video from my childhood that stays with me… 

Hard to narrow down to one, but there are 3 that have stayed with me, all for clear reasons:

Jaffa cake – Total Eclipse – 1999 – I was only six years old at the time. In the advert the woman eats the Jaffa cake in such an iconic way that I used to recreate it in the playground, it also meant gobbling my way through a pack of Jaffa cakes quicker than I otherwise would have!

Andrex – The Andrex Puppy adverts were iconic to me, and every time it would come on I would ask for an Andrex Puppy. I meant the real puppy, but they did once run a promotion where if you brought certain packs you could get a toy Andrex puppy, so my mum got her hands on one for me! Who would have thought a toilet roll advert would be so memorable?! But that is the power of having a brand animal/mascot.

BN BN – 1999 – Another biscuit-based advert that is super memorable to me is the BN BN advert, this one owes the power of its distinctiveness to the catchy song! 

These adverts were all examples of why I found advertising so interesting, as different techniques such as the use of audio/song, animals or a funny way to consume the product has the power to make an advert so powerful and memorable.

The creative work that I keep revisiting…

Since the beginning of the year I took over the UGG account, and during the partnership of ITB Worldwide and UGG since AW20 some incredible activations both globally and at an EMEA level have been activated. They have been real trailblazing campaigns with the talent selected, and the content delivered and so I keep revisiting the previous activations and talent selections to make sure we keep elevating the brand, develop longer term talent partnerships with those who have delivered well for the brand and making the campaigns work harder for the client.

My first professional project…

One of the main clients I first worked on was Philips, we ran digital campaigns across their toothbrush, shaving, baby and beauty categories. The most distinct first campaign I ran for them was for Philips Avent (for their breast pump range for mothers), I was fascinated by this first activation as we used data to cleverly target new mothers, we delivered adverts based on a list of search terms that we deemed a new mother to be searching for, as well as time targeting across mobile ads, as we found mothers would be up in the night on their phones whilst feeding their newborns.

The piece of work that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*… 

Not quite an advert etc, but it angers me to this day the insensitive sweater designed by Gucci that hit the runway before receiving backlash as the garment resembled a blackface. It was a hugely ignorant mistake made by Gucci, and this activation to me is an example of why you should always have a diverse team, so that you have different perspectives making sure campaigns are super inclusive, and not inappropriate or disrespectful.  

The piece of work that I wish was mine… 

A recent example of something I was jealous of, and an activation I was obsessed with is the Francis Bourgeois X North Face and Gucci. A real trend is niche influencers, and something deemed uncool such as trainspotting has had quite the revolution thanks to Francis Bourgeois, so seeing his collab with two of the coolest brands was so refreshing. The earned media from this activation shows the power of influencer. I also love his most recent collab with Bicester Village, he has been making some very smart brand choices!

The creative project that changed my career… 

It has to be the first campaign that I worked on that was shortlisted for many industry awards, and made it into industry press. This was for the make-up brand NARS. During the first lockdown NARS was struggling as people were wearing less make-up and as their stores and counters were closed they could not rely on their sales team to bring new customers in. Therefore, I developed a media activation for them whereby they partnered with Spotify and SendMeASample to deliver samples to their door. The insight for utilizing Spotify was due to music listening increasing during lockdown and this being a key passion point for the NARS audience. NARS had never done audio ads, so we virtually recorded these, and delivered these ads to users who were female between 18-35. The audio ad informed the audience that they just needed to ask their smart speaker for a NARS sample, and after answering through voice a few questions the user would be sent a mascara, bronzer or lip product. We ran out of samples within a matter of days, and so we did a phase 2 due to the success, it delivered a huge amount of reviews, and helped build NARS’ CRM database. It was exciting as it was an innovative activation during lockdown.

The work that I’m proudest of… 

Creating TSB’s first ad funded programme (AFP). TSB had sponsored Pride of Britain Awards for years, and I had helped run this sponsorship for them, alongside a huge campaign with Heart Radio. For the 20 years of Pride of Britain special I worked closely with ITV, the Daily Mirror and TSB to produce a 1 hours “Pride of Britain: Celebrating 20 years” episode. This was my first experience of working with talent, negotiating payment and contracts etc, which has then led me to where I am now at ITB Worldwide. 

The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most… 

Knorr World Eat for Good Day. To mark ‘World Eat for Good Day’ which took place on February 19th, Knorr wanted to focus the world’s attention on how we can eat for the good of the planet. And therefore, alongside Mullen Lowe, they generated the idea of using a loved top dish to inspire consumers to try and eat more planet friendlier foods. And thus, they created the Plizza! The Plizza incorporated foods that are sustainable for the planet, and Knorr’s vegetable recipe mix. The clients enlisted the help of ITB Worldwide to build the influencer strategy and toolkit to be rolled out across all markets, and to deliver and project manage the influencer activation in the USA.

The purpose of the campaign was to utilise influencers to drive awareness of the Plizza and to highlight the importance of making sustainable food swaps. For the US activation we worked with 11 influencers producing 58 posts. For which we orchestrated sending each influencer all the ingredients to produce two Plizza’s. It always excites me when we get to work closely with clients to really advise them on how an influencer activation should be rolled out globally, and then also bring it to life ourselves by running the campaign!