UPP came to us with a challenge: make health and safety engaging. We needed to inspire and captivate, not scare and reprimand.

The new initiative focused on positive behaviour, not rules and regulations (which everyone agreed they had got plenty of), so we knew this should be a human-focused campaign. We used hands to represent community and teamwork; to remind us that it’s the practical day-to-day tasks – everything we do with our hands – that comprise safety at work.   

We worked with the illustrator Damien Weighill to create a suite of lively characters working in jobs where their lives were very obviously at stake. This grabbed attention and highlighted the fact that even though the jobs at UPP weren’t as infamously risky as flying to the moon, people’s lives are still on the line – whether it’s the contractors on construction sites or the students in their halls.

The overall look and feel was a departure from UPP’s corporate branding, a decision we made to highlight how different the campaign was from what had come before and make it strikingly obvious that the company was taking a bold new direction with its approach to wellbeing.