The Big Issue is a UK street magazine sold by those facing poverty as an alternative to begging. When COVID struck, Big Issue vendors had their livelihoods collapse overnight. Unable to sell their magazines on the high streets because of lockdown restrictions and many people working from home, we needed a way to reconnect them with their loyal customers online. Since the majority of these previous customers were on LinkedIn, we chose that platform to recreate their old neighbourhoods digitally, using location data to find the office workers and businesspeople who used to walk by and buy from them every day. We worked with LinkedIn to give valuable training to each vendor and each vendor was given an ecomm trigger to use within conversations to drive sales of the magazine. The program has fundamentally shifted how The Big Issue does business, but also allowed for a massive perception change, showing Big Issue vendors as legitimate business owners who have a right to be on LinkedIn. The campaign won Grand Prix / ECommerce, 2 Golds, 2 Silvers and a Bronze at Cannes, 2 Yellow and 1 Wood pencil at D&AD, and 2 Golds and a Silver at The One Show.

This project is:
Client-commissioned

Agency
FCB Inferno

Client URL
https://www.bigissue.com/, https://www.linkedin.com/

My Role in This Project
My role was as an Associate Creative Director on this project, and I was involved from the original briefing all the way through to the product launch and case study creation. This client is particularly close to my heart as my stepmother's mom (who unfortunately passed away before I could meet her) spent many years homeless on the street and dealt with mental health issues. My stepmom is very vocal in the community, and I try to support and magnify her perspective, so I feel it is important to use my work to help the cause in any way that I can.
In my role, I supervised a more junior copywriter/art director team to shape the creative and make it especially relevant to the local market, as the team were new to the account and also had recently moved to the UK from abroad. Having worked on the account since March 2019, I was able to use my knowledge of the client and of the London landscape to sell the idea in and help bring it to life in the most effective way possible. I worked closely with the design team from logo design to overall campaign look and feel, pushing the somewhat limiting brand guidelines where we could to create work that would stand out and feel positive and fresh, especially in a time period where there was so much negativity on the internet because of Covid.
I was also heavily involved in the case study, shaping the overall story and supervising all the graphics and animation, creating a film which is incredibly important in continuing to get the word out about the campaign and drive subscriptions and engagement with the vendors.