This campaign sucks

Client: Dentsu

My role: Creative lead across concept, campaign and production.

The brief: Warren Street is one of London's most congested roads for air pollution. The brief was to use creativity and influence to raise mass awareness of the UK's air pollution crisis and drive genuine behaviour change, using Global Action Plan's Clean Air Day, the UK's largest air pollution campaign, as the launch moment and call to action.

What we made: A large scale mural on Euston Road painted with carbon busting technology. The paint itself, Reactivair by PURETi, is an eco-friendly clear topcoat made from titanium dioxide that reduces harmful nitrogen oxide levels in the atmosphere by up to 73% when applied to concrete and brick. The mural wasn't just a piece of communication. It was literally cleaning the air around it.

The concept leant into the tension between art and function with deliberately provocative copy. The campaign name said everything: This Campaign Sucks. Not a boast, but a statement of fact. The work used that tension to draw people in, then let the science behind the paint do the rest.

The mural itself was designed and illustrated by the very talented Woody Woods, a fellow CD (and illustrator) at Dentsu Creative whose work brought a bold, vibrant energy to the piece that stopped people in their tracks on one of London's busiest roads.

Alongside the physical mural, the Dentsu Creative team built an augmented reality experience accessible via a QR code next to the artwork. Scanning it brought the illustration to life through your phone, with pollutants visibly floating in the air around you. You could interact with them directly, pressing and swiping them towards the mural and watching them be absorbed into the paint. It turned a passive piece of street art into something people could genuinely engage with and understand.

The activation was supported across social, digital and PR, designed to leverage Dentsu's networks to amplify the message beyond the physical location.