No Egos, No Rules, Just Results - Behind Unlimited & Pablo’s Government Consortium

From handwashing campaigns to promoting holiday hotspots, tax guidance to fire prevention, public sector briefs span the everyday to the essential. They aim to save lives and keep citizens safe. For ad agencies, they offer creative variety and a chance to collaborate rather than compete. And in at least one case, a consortium working within the Government framework is proving that partnership pays. 

Since 2022, Pablo has been working alongside Accenture Song’s Unlimited Group, in collaboration with creative agency TMW and its Human Understanding Lab (HUL), to deliver high-profile, behavior-changing campaigns. Together, they have created work for government departments from HMRC, the Metropolitan Police, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the Department for Business and Trade. Earlier this year, the pair won the £16m two-year contract to run all domestic and international campaigns for the Cabinet Office too.

“We instinctively knew that the sum would be greater than the parts if we got together,” says Elinor Jones, managing partner on the Government account for Unlimited. “At heart, both agencies have the same values, and what we want to do is to do good work that makes a difference, and that's basically what our public sector work is.” 

The two came together in 2022 when Unlimited president Tim Bonnet invited Pablo founder Gareth Mercer to discuss the possibility of forming the Unlimited and Pablo Consortium, which would give them both access to the government’s Media and Creative framework. The idea proved to be a smart one.

“The pull of government and wanting to come together around that was really compelling because it's such a brilliant opportunity to really do creative, innovative work that has real-world impact. And that's not to diminish the commercial impact of a lot of the other clients that we work with, but I think that was a real pull for us as a real kind of creative opportunity and the challenges and briefs from the government face,” adds Eve Bui, client partner for Pablo. 

Working together

The consortium aims to work together under the mantra ‘no egos and no rules’, teaming their best experts through blended teams to answer each brief. They are also honest with themselves that they don’t hold all of the necessary services under one roof. And when that happens, they look externally for other partners, such as partnerships agency Forum, and We Communications (formerly Hopscotch Consulting). 

They are willing to do whatever it takes to successfully answer a brief and drill down into human understanding and deliver “disruptive thinking” through a completely different method of tackling an issue, explains both Jones and Bull. 

“It’s about asking, 'How do we do this?' and 'What kind of interesting ways can we do it that are genuinely going to be quite surprising and unexpected to shift the dial?' And I think that's what the clients echo back to us. We've got a nice rhythm in that space where we push each other in the right way to do different things,” believes Bui. 

While the blended teams consist of personnel from both sides, a nominal lead is chosen first before the team is built. Where the consortium is unique is that it may have account handling in one agency and creative sitting in the other, or they might span both. Whatever the bespoke setup, they are tasked with working seamlessly together as one. 

“In all honesty, as a client, you wouldn't notice unless you looked at people's email addresses,” claims Bui.  “We've ignored the boundaries between our organisations and gone, ‘Look, we have a whole pot of brilliant people now across our two agencies. Who are the right people to put around this particular problem?’”.

These teams are then small and nimble enough to adapt when necessary, with the internal phrase ‘Speedboat not tanker’ coined to give the team autonomy around problem-solving while being collaborative with the client. The setup also allows the consortium to offer “niche or random solutions” if required by pulling further people onto a brief, if needed. 

Changing Behaviours Through Ads and Influencers

The campaigns produced over the last three years have shown a breadth and diversity of work, from a brief to change perceptions of the Metropolitan Police, to working with various Hollywood studios to promote UK tourism, and supporting the launch of HMRC’s app and building interest in tax. 

Unlike commercial projects with a marketer and, occasionally, the CEO to sell ideas to, government work can be far more complex, with various internal stakeholders, ministers, media, and taxpayers for the consortium to gain buy-in from. 

“They're very happy to see things that are perhaps different to what they've done before, as long as you can completely underpin it,” reveals Jones about the potential limitations public sector work could impose. 

To tackle each challenge, the consortium has used varying tactics, from messaging that elicited perhaps surprising emotions such as humour and poignancy, showcasing that there is no one approach across the framework.  

And, of course, measurement of public spending and proving success is key, guided by a standard government communications service framework. Creative can also be tested through the HUL by asking opinions from real people to gain initial reactions to ideas at the beginning of a process. Meanwhile, AI tools provided by Unlimited’s parent company Accenture Song offer quantitative and qualitative testing at scale and at speed. 

With a proven track record, the consortium has gained trust from government departments to forge its own path on briefs. 

“They all hear about the brilliant work and the effectiveness, and they all want to be doing that. That's what fuels this desire to keep pushing and to really push for unexpected ideas,” says Bui. 

And operating with a tighter budget through this framework than was previously available, the briefs are asking more to reach audiences for less, while the tactic has changed to be more trusted and personalised in recent years, too. Human behaviour is changing. No longer is the solution to most briefs about turning up on traditional platforms, as media consumption evolves. 

“Those have been the real stepchange for us, and particularly with the government and governments around the world. Trust is an issue. It's not just for our government, it's for every government, and so we have had to bolster, in a good way, our influencer team, and we've done a lot of work with government clients through influencers,” explains Jones. 

The use of trusted influencers has enabled the creation of content at scale while saving on public sector budgets. Meanwhile, the use of synthetic audience testing to gauge attitudes and demographics has also grown.

But through all of that, the aim is to drive behaviour through creative that surprises audiences, making it memorable. 

“There's so much noise in the world, and often we're sometimes telling people something they don't want to hear. So how do you get that cut through? And how do you really get into their world? You need different tactics depending on what you're saying,” claims Bui. 

Here is an agency partnership that wants the public to expect more of the unexpected from public sector campaigns. 

Other agencies currently on the roster are, 23Red, Accenture Song, DDB UK, FCB Inferno, Four Agency Worldwide, Freud Communications, Havas UK, House 337, M&C Saatchi, MullenLowe London, and VML.