supermarket aisles led this planner to launch Total Media's Creative Planning Team

Ella Britton has been on both sides of the field, starting her career at the advertising agency that was-once JWT (now Wunderman Thompson) and moving to the BBC just before lockdown. Having been at Total Media for a little over a year now, she launched Total Media’s first creative planning team.

She brought together 15- cross-functional experts from the agency to deliver transformative performance for their clients and the results speak for themselves. Since the team’s conception, TM has won £40 million of new business and generated £225k of incremental income from existing clients. The highlights include a Scholl cinema campaign inspired by the iconic Barbie foot arch to Rustlers taxi swarm- which saw branded taxis strategically “swarm” competitive retailers at specific times, driving cut through and on-street impact for the burger brand. Creative planning is now at the forefront of the agency's agenda and clients can’t get enough. 

But what drew Ella to the creative life in the first place? Creative Salon finds out.

Ella: It wouldn’t be possible to talk about creative heroes without mentioning my dad, one of the most relentlessly creative people I have ever met. Having spent years working with consumer brands, he would always encourage me to look at a product or service and see the story. We would spend hours crouching in supermarket aisles discussing the importance of shelf positioning, stand-out visual creative, and differentiation from competitors, and constructing the story of the brand from start to finish. If my dad had a new brief, he’d ask me about it. He always encouraged me to be curious, confident, and most importantly have an opinion. 

My time at the BBC really shaped the way I viewed creativity and myself as a creative thinker. I joined 5 days before lockdown (yikes) as an audience planner for BBC Sounds and immediately felt energised by the work I was doing and the people I was surrounded by. In my first couple of months, I had worked on a new genre strategy for True Crime, explored the future of Bitesize, and created an innovative audience segmentation with Beatrice Cooke, a brilliant content strategy lead I lived on Zoom with. At BBC Sounds I was empowered to blur the lines between strategic thinking and creative execution, something I am lucky enough to now do on a daily basis. 

It would be remiss not to include a future creative hero that I couldn’t be more excited about. Ruby Hann is a broadcast executive in the creative planning team who generates ideas in a way that truly inspires those around her. When she has something to say, I can physically see the creativity bubbling inside of her, and the energy she has when communicating said ideas is impossible to ignore. Ruby will make waves in the industry and continue to bridge the gap between advertising and media- so best to watch this space!  

Ella Britton is Strategy Director at Total Media and Behave