ABOUT

Salford City Council asked Whistlejacket to deliver a campaign platform and creative campaign assets to be used as part of a roll out of media bursts within the city to support Salford High Streets, a programme supported by the Welcome Back Fund.
The fund is used to support the return to high streets safely and help build back better following the Covid pandemic. It builds on the £50m Reopening High Street Safely Fund (RHSSF) and formed part of wider support the government provided to communities and businesses, to protect jobs, support the most vulnerable and ensure no one is left behind as the UK continued to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic and begin to build back better.
This piece of work was designed to support the communications and public information campaign targeted at a residents, local businesses, and visitors. The new campaign supported high streets by targeting residents who may need their confidence building back informing them that they are able to go out and visit their local high streets and neighbourhood shopping centres.

Separate funding was used to appoint an events management team. This led to a programme of a range of events at a selection of specified locations at Christmas, February half term and Easter holidays. The aim was to animate these high streets and attract further audiences to the areas. Our new designs and campaign platform also needed to be able to support this work.

Mediums:
OOH media (6 sheets, 48 sheets), bus streetliners and rears, taxis sides and tip seats, van wrap, lamppost pennants, phone kiosks, programmatic, CTV, film, digital online assets (social media, website, e-newsletter) and event collateral (posters, leaflets, A-boards)

Concept:
We wanted to welcome people not so much back to Salford, as HOME to Salford.
We knew that everyone involved in the campaign and the local community - residents, employers, and regular visitors to the area - feel a tremendous emotional attachment to Salford, that it’s a place they have great affection for, and a place that during lockdown they will have missed. We also know the area had suffered under lockdown and needed people to actively start using local Salford businesses and services to help get them back on their feet.
We also knew that while this wasn’t a ‘safety’ campaign, people still felt nervous about going out, and need reassurance that when making choices about where to shop and visit that they are making a secure choice. And where is safer than home?
So, we made ‘Home is on Your High Street’ the central message of the campaign

Execution:
We wanted to remind people that Home is the place that we fill with our memories, where we create new ones and look back at old ones.

Using the ‘Home is on Your High Street’’ campaign platform, we created a picture frame campaign device. We then took the designed asset and filled it with photographs of local people in Salford, designed to appear as though it is hung on the streets, to bring the spirit of home onto the streets. We commissioned photographer Harry Lawlor to shoot images of local businesspeople and their customers all over Salford so that the campaign reflected a genuine representation of local people coming back to the Hight Street across the city. We ensured the campaign reflected a rich mix of ages, genders and ethnicity to reflect the vibrant Salford community.

We likewise wrote and developed a campaign film featuring Strictly Come Dancing, and Coronation Street star Catherine Tyldesley, a local resident in Salford, to extol the virtues of local High Streets and remind everyone why they used to love it – and should come back to support their friends and families running businesses in the area.

We used the City’s magenta palette to link the campaign back to the spirit of Salford and Visit Salford brands, while we used a #SalfordHighStreets hashtag to link the campaign.

We developed three bursts of activity reflecting Christmas, the Spring Half Term break and Easter. We worked very closely with local events companies who organised a High Streets tour of music around local high streets,. We commissioned a stage for these events designed like a picture frame, designed a van wrap for moving music, plus developed multiple pieces of supporting and promotional collateral in both digital and non-digital formats.

Over the course of the campaign we then saw a marked rise in footfall tracked over Salford High Streets.

Results:
"We’ve had a great response from local businesses, who have been so pleased this campaign has been in place to raise awareness of the high street offer and encourage people to rediscover their local high streets. We’ve seen a real pride from businesses being on our high streets and from the public who are keen to support local, independent businesses. This has translated into increased footfall during key times during the campaign activity."

Dan Stribling - Communications Manager Salford Council.

Project credits:

Partner (Project Management): Richard Morris
Partner (Strategy): Matty Tong
Project Manager: Kayleigh Dibbens
Creative Concepting/Designer: Michael Christodoulou
Designer: Sid Gurung
Animation/Artwork: Rich Wilmott
Photography: Harry Lawlor
Film/Director: Black Revolver