By Imogen Holland and Amy McDermott

A few weeks ago, we blended two of the most exciting aspects of our agency together – our commitment to CSR and our commitment to strategic, insight-driven communications that embody our ethos of Being Human.

We invited the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to share a communications challenge with us. We then divided into groups to put our recent training into practice, to deliver strategic pro bono communications plans and ideas for the BHF.

The BHF is the UK’s largest independent funder of heart and circulatory research, helping to find treatments that give people more time with loved ones.

To kick off our afternoon, Josie Roberts and Saneeta Mandil from the BHF shared that while the BHF’s research funding comes primarily from legacy gifts and fundraising activities, their retail operations contribute a crucial 15-20% toward their lifesaving work. So, they set us the challenge to apply Virgo’s expertise to deliver communications plans that would encourage high-quality donations to BHF shops and online stores.

There was a buzz of energy in the room as colleagues from different departments came together, blending strategy, communications, medical education and creativity to tackle this challenge. Teams immersed themselves and were able to ask Josie and Saneeta any questions to help define their objectives enabling them to craft innovative campaigns and map out execution channels. All teams then presented their unique solutions and bold campaign ideas, that challenged perceptions about charity shop donations. One team even producing a video in under an hour!

In the end, one of our teams emerged victorious and was declared the winner, with the BHF even hoping to take their idea further and perhaps even into the real world.

This event perfectly captured what makes Virgo such a special place to work. Nearly two years into our careers within the pharma communications team, the agency has played a crucial role in our development, providing training and opportunities that have broadened our expertise in client relations and widening our industry knowledge.

As we reflect on our work with the BHF, we’re reminded of the collaborative spirit at Virgo. Our approach to projects, whether for clients or community partners, remains consistent: bringing creativity and strategic thinking to challenges that matter…and having lots of fun along the way. We look forward to more opportunities like this!

By Nina Bhagwat, Group DEI Director  

Today we are launching our most comprehensive London DEI Plan ever. It’s a reflection on what we have achieved, what we have heard, what we have learnt, as well as what we will focus on for the future.  

We hope you will recognise this as a transparent outline of our progress and a way to hold ourselves accountable, not a corporate show and tell. Because while sharing this is vital to create change, our approach to DEI is far more focussed on our people and how we bring many hearts, hands and minds together to create a more inclusive culture internally. 

READ THE PLAN HERE

The road to creating this plan has been an act of inclusion in itself and we’ve learnt a lot about ourselves along the way – from forming our inclusion ambition and behaviours in all staff sessions, to focus groups and steering groups on the content to actually creating the copy and design.  

This is also for the first time we’ve reported our data. We are reporting our inclusion statistics from our annual BELONG survey and our representation data from our newly-implemented Self ID, voluntary DEI system. 

We are committed creating a diverse and inclusive culture and know a huge part of this is sharing data on representation and inclusion. Our BELONG inclusion data shows promising progress, but while we don’t have the full Self ID data picture yet, we have transparently outlined our progress in the Plan. We will be reporting this data annually for accountability and once we have a more complete data set we fully commit to reporting annually on Pay Gaps. 

Maybe not quiet, but humour can transform the power of consumer health communications.

Natasha Weeks, Executive Director and Consumer Health lead at Virgo Health and Golin, reflects on this year’s Cannes Lions.

People don’t sit up and listen to healthcare messages when they are preachy, scary or boring. So why do we continue to produce healthcare campaigns that are scaremongering, finger-pointing and overloaded with statistical data. Focusing too heavily on the problem can cause the very people we are trying to reach to put their fingers in their ears and ignore us.

Effective communication comes in many forms but reflecting on my experience at this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity – we should harness the power of humour to drive behaviour change.

Humour was a big theme at Cannes 2024. There were 13 new humour sub-categories, including PR. It featured in many panels, including the ‘Ready Laugh Again: The Return of Comedy’ session with comedian Kenan Thompson of Saturday Night Live. “Humour is all about connection,” he said. “Humour cuts through the noise. We live in a state of constant assault on our senses, but if something is funny, you’ll seek it out. It doesn’t mean you have to shy away from tough stuff, humour is one of the best ways to deal with rough things going on in the world.”

Health is no different. While leaning into levity as a healthcare brand is not always easy, when done right there is nothing to touch it. Our Specsavers audiology campaign, The Misheard Version, started a conversation about hearing loss that has been shied away from for years. And it was all down to the shared laugh over Rick Astley’s misheard lyrics. It’s difficult to do justice to it here without the backing instrumentals but “Your Aunt’s been naked” and “You wouldn’t catch nits from any other guy” did make people sit up and listen.

People avoid hearing tests because to many, it symbolises the beginning of the end – old age – and there is stigma around hearing aids. But the impact of hearing loss can be huge – from leaving employment early to loneliness. Hearing tests are also important because they can detect the early signs of chronic diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or diabetes.

Hearing loss isn’t funny, but our key insight that hearing loss is isolating and mishearing connects led us to a humourous idea that brought people together. Humour disrupts, connects, doesn’t judge and ultimately cuts through when serious messages don’t.

We weren’t laughing at people – we were all part of the joke – even our target audience’s kids were in on it. In using humour, we made hearing loss less heavy and created a simple reminder that we need to get our hearing checked.

And it worked. By shifting the conversation around hearing loss with a humorous, engaging campaign we were able to increase hearing tests by 66%.

Jury President Kat Thomas, on awarding the Grand Prix to The Misheard Version for Specsavers, said: “Healthcare is not a sexy category, and it was a very challenging brief, but they leant into humour in an all-in way to really tackle the stigma.”

Consumer health campaigns fundamentally need to engage audiences to prompt behaviour change, and humour is a powerful tool to do this. I look forward to seeing more healthcare campaigns utilise the power of humour – and take the stage at next year’s Cannes Lions.

We are so proud to announce that our ground-breaking work for Specsavers has won six awards at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, including two highly prestigious Grand Prix. The creative campaign, which we worked on alongside our sister agency, Golin, also won a Gold Lion and three Silver Lions across the Audio & Radio Lions, PR Lions and Health & Wellness Lions.

In fact, the Grand Prix in the PR Lions made history for Golin and Virgo, as we became the first-ever PR agency to win PR Lions Grand Prix awarded for our creative idea.

In a bold move to address hearing loss, we transformed one of the most famously misheard songs into an unavoidable nationwide hearing test. Partnering with singer Rick Astley, we re-recorded his 80’s smash hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” with intentionally incorrect lyrics. Within eight hours, over 20 million people played the new “misheard” version, doubling online searches related to hearing loss and propelling it to a nationally trending topic in the UK on Google. Specsavers exceeded its hearing test booking target by an unprecedented 1220%.

WATCH THE CASE FILM HERE

Cannes Lions Audio & Radio jury president and chief creative officer at Colenso BBDO, New Zealand, Simon Vicars, shared the jury’s verdict, saying: “The Misheard Version by Specsavers is a brilliant example of creativity turned up to 11. A nationwide hearing test, disguised inside an iconic song. Creative to its core and recklessly ambitious in its execution. It powered business results and broke into culture. Thank you, Specsavers for making us laugh, for committing properly to this idea and for making our jury’s biggest decision an easy one.”

Al Wood, chief creative officer at Golin London, reveled at the work’s impact: “An incredible result. This was an earned-first idea that started in laughter, but ended up changing how Brits hear. It owes its success to so many people – and it means the world to see that collective work recognised and celebrated on such a global stage.”