The UK Cabinet Office campaigns chief tells Tim Healey how advertising skills translate to public behaviour change, why trust and misinformation are now central challenges for government communications and what Covid taught him about cutting through complexity without losing nuance.
You started in advertising before moving into government communications in 2000. How did that journey lead you to your current role as director of cross-government marketing & campaigns at the Cabinet Office?
When I left university, I was fascinated by advertising and after knocking on many doors, I got a job as the personal assistant to the chairman and creative director of a small agency and from there, learned how to be a copywriter.
I was paired with a junior art director in the ‘creative nursery’ and we pitched our ideas for any brief that came in; our first success was an advertising campaign to launch the very first personal computer, Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum…. how technology has moved on since then!
I moved on to a small international agency and then broke away from there with my art director, and we went into business together; our first office was a houseboat on the River Thames. By the age of 40, I’d sold our business and, while I still loved the business of advertising, I wanted to apply myself to something more purposeful.
A friend suggested I join the civil service and I got a job at the Central Office of Information (COI), which was effectively the government’s advertising agency.
I discovered the skills I’ve learned in advertising could be readily transferred to the public sector; except that, instead of persuading consumers to buy a product or service, I was tasked to try and persuade teenage drug misusers to choose treatment at the point of arrest, rather than a jail sentence.
It still required insight, an understanding of behaviour change and the ability to create and evaluate compelling propositions, just like the private sector. I found it hugely satisfying to see how communications could be used for the public good.
From the COI, I moved next to the Cabinet Office and then spent 6 years at the Foreign Office as Head of Campaigns and Public Diplomacy.
Then came the 2012 Olympics and I was asked to go to No10 to set up the international GREAT Britain campaign. During that time, I had the great privilege to meet many members of the Royal Family, and a large number of brilliant British entrepreneurs, sports stars, actors, designers, persuading them to speak out for the strengths of this country.
I was working at the Department of International Trade when Covid struck and volunteered to go back to the Cabinet Office to help out. During that time, I ran all the public behaviour change campaigns for 23 months solid, from ‘stay home, save lives’ to the vaccination campaigns.
Today, I oversee many of the government’s major behaviour change campaigns, spanning violence against women and girls, domestic energy reduction and giving children the best start in life. I’m also responsible for innovation and the use of AI across government communications and, have just completed the Government’s procurement process, getting the best agencies in the business on our books.
Government is fascinating and full of opportunity. I had no idea I would travel the world and spend 6 years in No10 Downing Street when I joined the civil service, but I’m incredibly glad that I did.
You have to justify every pound of taxpayers’ money that is spent on communications. How do you go about judging effectiveness?
You’re right, measurement and evaluation are so important when you’re spending taxpayers’ money, and we work incredibly hard on establishing – and improving – the effectiveness of all our campaigns. I hope that is why, over the years, we have won so many IPA Effectiveness and Effie awards!
Some of the campaigns we run are relatively easy to measure; for instance, the GREAT Britain campaign has conservatively generated £7bn in return on investment since its launch in 2011.
We can see this in the increased numbers of tourists, international students and trade and inward investment deals that can be ascribed to the campaign. For our public sector recruitment campaigns, we can track the journeys of potential recruits into the armed forces, prison and probation service or the NHS. During Covid, we also managed to encourage nearly 24 million people to download the Covid app, a huge figure compared with other nations.
For behavior change campaigns, we often use econometrics to judge the impact. During Covid, for instance, we could conservatively model how many deaths we prevented through communications.
The other side of effectiveness is efficiency – and we have recently made great efforts to cut down the number of campaigns, encouraging government departments to join up and take an audience-first approach, sharing research, working with a single agency and harnessing the latest technology to become ever more effective.
In more typical brand marketing, there’s a push and pull between longer-term brand marketing and shorter-term performance marketing activities. When you’re trying to achieve behavior change, how do you go about deciding where to put your effort and the budget?
That’s a great question. Government definitely has some very powerful brands – the NHS, GREAT, THINK (road safety) and gov.uk are noticeable examples – and we protect and invest in those brands, tracking their performance over the long term, much as is done in the private sector. And we can see how these brands pay us back.
But, unlike the private sector, where brands are invaluable at establishing long-term memory structures and directing consumer choice in a highly competitive environment, in many cases in government, there is no choice – for instance, you really do need to fill in your tax returns with HMRC, rather than an alternative provider! So we need to take this into account when looking at where we place our efforts. That’s where short-burst campaigns to complete your tax return on time and online are needed.
We also have to be mindful that our campaigns are subject to changes of government and policy, so the decision to invest heavily in a brand long term to reap the benefits need to be examined in this light.
I do think, however, that our greatest challenge is the lack of trust in the government and public sector, and this is where demonstrating government delivery – in addition to running campaigns that aim to change behaviors – is important.
I recently contributed to a book published by the Advertising Association (‘Trusted Advertising: How to harness the value of trust in your brand’ by Matt Bourn & James Best) on how government can close the trust deficit and show public institutions as a force for good. This, I believe, will require longer-term brand thinking.
You’ve been closely associated with some of the UK’s most widely recognized public health messaging, like ‘hands, face, space’ during Covid. What did you learn about the trade-off between simplicity, which drives recall, and nuance, which sustains legitimacy? Would you do anything different now?
Our role as government communications is to boil down complex issues into simple, but not simplistic, messages. But we are mindful that this is very much top of the funnel communications, and important as it is, it is equally important to guide citizens to the more detailed information they need to make decisions. You’ve therefore got to have both.
‘Hands, face, space’ was, I think, a very powerful and memorable distillation of quite complex Covid guidance on behaviors that were needed – and made available – during that phase of the pandemic. I think we got the balance right here. We learned a lot about maintaining this balance during Covid, and have fed our insights into the Covid inquiry, which is still ongoing, so I can’t really add more at this point.
However, I can say that, during the pandemic, I was incredibly privileged to be working with a group of people – experts from the private sector and civil servants – who worked all hours for 23 months to deliver the government’s key messages. They were united in a single mission to save lives and livelihoods and took their responsibilities incredibly seriously, whatever the personal pressures and challenges they faced.
We’re in an era where baseline distrust is higher than ever before: how do you cope with increased distrust and faster misinformation?
It is a challenge. Misinformation is one of our key concerns, and there is constant overt activity to combat it. We have had some success; for instance, going back to Covid, we persuaded a lot of people who were initially hesitant about vaccines (some of which was fueled by misinformation) to get the jabs.
Misinformation and disinformation now come in so fast and so hard from every direction that getting a first-class response is more and more difficult.
We have built capability to understand how to intervene in the right way at the right time – for instance in our response to public disorder after the Southport tragedy – but this is a constant battle.
In terms of increased distrust, as I said earlier, we regard this as one of the biggest challenges for government communicators at the moment.
We have the data to show that there is low trust in public institutions. If the decline in the public’s trust in institutions continues, it will have a real existential impact. Which is why we need to demonstrate every day that government is a force for good that is delivering real benefits to citizens,
We also do a lot of work with influencers and content creators, as well as partner with subject matter experts and local voices who are trusted in their communities. They can be very powerful and effective generators of trust.
We also find that people who see our behavior change campaigns tend to have more confidence in the government’s ability to grip that particular policy – for instance, that we are gripping online fraud or combating violence against women and girls.
How is your marketing team structured?
Because we act as a central team here at HQ, we tend not to have the usual structure of a departmental delivery unit. Instead, I lead a small team of marketing experts, backed up by behavioral scientists, research and insight professionals and teams who focus on AI development and marketing innovation. Our role is to be both the thought leaders and the active contributors to the efforts of departments.
We’re also looking at building our in-house capability further, following the creation of the New Media Unit, which has received quite a lot of press attention. We think there is more that we can do to engage the public directly through channels they consume, rather than using external agencies.
Finally, we also have a training team to upskill the government communications community, as well as setting standards, policies and guidelines. As I said, we’re more of a functional headquarters than a traditional marketing department.
How do you surf the tsunami of rapidly evolving marketing technology?
First of all, keep to your basic marketing principles at all times. I’m a big fan of Mark Ritson and recently did his MiniMBA, which I would recommend to every marketer, however experienced you are. I learned so much and he really helps you see the wood from the trees!
Second, we encourage 10% of government campaign marketing budgets to be spent on innovation: on test-and-learn, on trying new techniques and on sharing the results. If it fails, it fails. But if it succeeds, then let’s learn, scale up and adopt the innovation for other campaigns.
We also work with really good agencies who continue to update us with the latest techniques and ensure that we don’t fall behind.
Finally, you can’t have any conversation about marketing technology without mentioning AI. We built our own tool in-house, GCS Assist, for government communicators. Assist is secure and available to all GCS members, and is now used by 8,000 people across 253 public sector organizations for tasks ranging from strategy creation and brainstorming to proposition testing. It’s only 24 months old but has already been used over a million times and is increasing productivity across the profession as well as helping us become more confident and agile in our work.
What myth would you most like to bust about marketing?
I’m going to have to say that I’m not sure of the value of marketing as an academic subject for a first degree at university. I don’t think this is necessarily a myth, but personally, I prefer to meet people who want to get into marketing who have a background in psychology, economics or even history. Then they can learn and, most importantly, practically apply their learnings in a commercial environment.
I do think reading on the subject (and even doing a Ritson MBA later in your career) is invaluable, but the qualities you need to be a great marketer are, in my view, curiosity about how human beings tick, a really strong understanding of culture, an ability to tell compelling stories, bags of energy and optimism and a great ‘can-do’ attitude.
When I was working at the Foreign Office, some of the best campaigners in my team were diplomats who had these qualities in abundance. It was relatively easy then to teach them the theory of how to understand audiences or plan and deliver a campaign.
Another myth I would like to bust is that data is everything; it shouldn’t override your instinct. You’re a human being communicating with human beings. Data is supremely helpful, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all.
What would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?
If you weren’t a marketer, what would you be doing instead?
(For myself, it would have been cartooning!)
Your question from the last senior marketer that I interviewed: could you talk about a time when you were not intellectually flexible – a time when you realized that there was something that you should have been more open to accept?
Until quite recently, I judged myself by my ability to successfully deliver a campaign. I’m sure many marketers think this way.
It took me a long time to realize that you can have success in another way: by mentoring and encouraging other people to deliver, by giving them advice and shortcuts you’ve learned from experience, and, effectively, by being the person who gets them to succeed.
These days, I find more joy in success when I’ve helped others deliver. I’m so proud of much of the work I’ve done in government, the awards I’ve won, and, as a former copywriter, would consider ‘Hands, face, space’ as one of my best slogans! But I’m prouder still of the successes that have come about as a result of helping others.
If there is one thing you know about marketing, it is?
You learn something new every day. People change, culture changes, technology changes. I think that’s fascinating and exciting.
This interview is brought to you in partnership with Worth Your While – an independent creative agency based in Copenhagen, working globally. Named one of The Drum’s Indie Agency Top 100, WYW exists on the belief that time is humanity’s most valuable resource, and that the only ideas
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Tim Healey listens, learns, and synthesizes real-world best practices from hundreds of marketing professionals and serves them up in his weekly interviews for The Drum.Tim’s Little Grey Cells Club is a trusted, no-sales, peer-driven network where senior-level marketing directors unite to exchange authentic insights, confront challenges, and drive leadership forward.
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