The Client’s Challenge
Jérrard Wayne developed ‘In The Heart Of It’, a Q4 campaign to promote Heart FM’s new slogan, ‘Turn Up The Feel Good’. The campaign focused on creating a unique campaign concept that stirred an emotive response in the target demographic.

Launched in 1994, Heart FM is one of Britain’s most popular commercial radio networks, broadcasting to over 7.4 million listeners across the UK every week. After adopting its new slogan, the station wanted to highlight its warmer messaging via an oxytocin-inducing campaign that created an emotional connection to the brand.

Our Approach
For the Q4 campaign, we focused on ‘feel-good’ moments throughout autumn and winter to generate positivity in the audience. Implementing psychological principles to induce positive emotions through visuals, we decided to focus on themes of ‘hygge’ and ‘cosiness’.

We created photographic scenes featuring Halloween, Fireworks Night, Christmas and general autumnal indicators. Each of these scenes was specifically created to generate feelings of warmth and happiness. With these scenes defined, we conceptualised a way to bring Heart FM into the centre of each creative without overwhelming the imagery.

To do so, we 3D-modelled a photorealistic graphic asset of Heart FM’s logo mark. The model featured a neon glow, making it a dynamic, compelling addition to any environment. The model assumed an abstract ‘character’ of the Heart FM brand, and when inserted into the Q4 environments, it allowed the brand to be a part of each of those ‘feel-good’ relatable scenarios, capturing Heart FM’s new expressive direction.

With the campaign direction defined, it was executed across various touchpoints, including digital out-of-home (DOOH) and out-of-home (OOH) advertising, online content, in-environment branding and print media.

Heart FM is a national radio network with headquarters in each region. It was crucial for the brand that the campaign imagery was specific to the region where it would appear. We duplicated each recognisable outdoor scene for each region – a Christmas scene in London would have an equivalent Christmas scene in Manchester and other regions.

With the campaign prepped for rollout, we then conducted tutorials with the marketing departments at each regional headquarters to teach them how the assets should and shouldn’t be used to correctly maintain the brand and the campaign’s visual identity. As the campaign expanded, these tutorials meant that Heart FM’s marketing teams were prepped to manage that process.

The Outcome
The campaign was successfully rolled out across the national Heart FM network, via all consumer-facing touchpoints, including prime media locations at Piccadilly Circus, on Transport for London (TfL), throughout Westfield shopping centres and on Manchester’s iconic tram carriages.

The ‘In The Heart Of It’ concept proved so popular that the 3D heart emblem became an official brand asset beyond the lifecycle of the campaign. It remained a part of the approved brand guidelines across all Heart FM regions.