MullenLowe Group UK

2020 was a year like no other for the world, for our industry and for MullenLowe Group in particular. It was also a high watermark for purpose, in all its forms: as campaign and organizational north star.

MullenLowe Group found itself at the heart of the coronavirus crisis last year, playing a leading role in the government's COVID-19 communications, and continuing our ever more critical nursing recruitment campaign. Our purpose: saving lives.

We were also busy leveraging purpose across our brand and NGO client base more generally: to ensure our clients' immediate response to the pandemic was front foot and appropriate... and to guide giant, change-making brands like Persil and Knorr for decades to come.

That mix of purpose as a visceral communications objective and a more thoughtful strategic brand tool reached right across our client base in 2020 and makes, we think, for an unusually robust Agency of the Year case.

Across the course of the year, we've worked with domestic and multinational clients on purpose-led creative ideas that simply had to be effective (and, where appropriate, sales-effective too). And partnered with everyone from Snapchat to Spotify, from TikTok to Twitch, to make sure that our work worked in different channels and against some very different audiences.

Purpose drove our brand too, with MullenLowe Group closing the year as IPA Effectiveness Awards Network of the Year (for our work for the NHS, the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sex Abuse and Wagamama) and top of Campaign's new business league table.