Campaigns & Concepts
UoB x CWG'22
OOH Campaign
The Opportunity
When Birmingham won the right to host the 2022 Commonwealth Games, the University of Birmingham saw an unmissable moment, not just as a sponsor, but as a civic institution that has shaped the city for over a century. UoB secured a substantial out-of-home advertising package spanning the weeks before, during, and after the Games. The brief landed with us: design and deliver a campaign that could hold its own across the entire city.
The package was significant in scale:
- A full tram wrap running city-wide routes
- 200 posters across the City Line train network
- A city domination package across Elonex digital and print OOH sites
- A global events package tied to the Games period
What We Were
There to Do
Three things mattered above everything else. First, to reaffirm UoB as a civic institution, not a university that sits on the edge of the city, but one that's woven into its culture, heritage, and future. Second, to build brand recognition with the regional audience and the hundreds of thousands of visitors arriving for the Games. Third, to communicate the depth of UoB's partnership, its contributions to research, sport, education, community, and urban development.
Finding the Right
Direction
I started where I usually do, looking outward. I studied how major sports campaigns communicate and the emotional registers they hit, then asked whether any of that energy matched what UoB actually needed to say. It didn't take long to realise the answer wasn't sport, it was people.
UoB's story is fundamentally human. So I shifted focus: researching language, landmarks, and cultural touchpoints synonymous with Birmingham and the West Midlands. Campaigns like Adidas' Impossible Is Nothing and Halifax's It's a People Thing became reference points, not to imitate, but to understand how brands create belonging at scale.
From there, I ran a stakeholder workshop to pressure-test the direction and get a shared sense of what the campaign needed to feel like. That conversation sharpened everything.
Design
Process
With a clear creative direction, I moved into sketching, not for the final designs, but to build a visual framework for our photography recce. The sketches mapped out shot compositions across the university campus and key city landmarks, giving our freelance photographer a clear brief and making our routes through the city efficient and intentional.
The real insight came during the shoot itself. By bringing graphic elements, gradient shapes, typographic overlays, into the field, we could composite in real time, testing how the design system would sit against actual environments, assessing colour contrast and spatial balance before we ever got back to the studio.
Stakeholder
Refinement
Back in studio, I developed a range of concept directions: tighter, more intimate executions focused on individual stories, alongside broader treatments that captured the city-wide scale of the Games. These concepts were refined through client feedback until the creative locked.
The Star of
the Show
For the tram wrap specifically, the brief asked us to celebrate UoB's cultural offering, its galleries, gardens, museums, concerts, and performances, in a way that could speak to the whole city, including younger audiences. What started as six design panels became five: a single, cohesive piece of moving artwork that carried the university's cultural identity across Birmingham's streets.
