Double award win for UCL’s Disruptive Thinking brand campaign

The campaign has won Gold in The Drum Design Awards, and Silver in the Fresh Awards, being recognised alongside some of the most creative and inspiring work produced by design and advertising agencies across the world. As well as this, it has been shortlisted for best Education Campaign in the 2020 CIPR Excellence Awards.

In September 2019, UCL launched the #MadeAtUCL public awareness campaign to demonstrate the real-life impact of UCL’s research and promote our achievements in a way that wider audiences could relate to. #MadeAtUCL showcased the top 100 Disruptive Discoveries from across all UCL faculties, and allowed the UCL community and general public to vote for their favourite story in the categories of Community, Culture, Health, Justice & Equality, Environment and Technology. Close to 20,000 votes were received across all the stories in just three months, and it is estimated that the associated social media campaign reached around 2 million people on social media.

Our Disruptive Discoveries are now being shared, discussed and celebrated on the Made At UCL podcast, which you can listen to on the UCL Minds website.

"Disruptive Discoveries Since 1826” was originally launched in early 2019, to coincide with work beginning at the UCL East construction site on the Queen Elizabeth Park in Stratford, East London. Teams from UCL Communications & Marketing, Estates and UCL East worked alongside Jack Renwick design studio to develop the campaign on the theme of UCL's world-leading research, highlighting some of UCL’s most impactful work and showing how UCL is tackling some of the world’s greatest problems. The striking graphics were intended to introduce the public in the London Borough of Newham to UCL’s groundbreaking research, and raise awareness of the kind of work that would be happening at UCL East. It was estimated that the hoardings and display on the side of the West Ham football stadium were seen by around 15,000 people a day passing through the park.

Collette Lux, Executive Director of UCL Communications & Marketing, said: “This has been an amazingly successful campaign for UCL – it’s the first time that we’ve undertaken a project like this, and the size and scope of the campaign has been incredible. We’ve reached around five million people and managed to secure space on the side of the West Ham Stadium in Stratford – a brilliant achievement. I’m thrilled that this work has been recognized with a couple of very prestigious pan-industry awards. I’d like to thank the teams from CAM, Estates and UCL East who worked so hard on the campaign, and of course the wonderful team at Jack Renwick Studio for their beautiful and innovative graphics, which really bring to life the transformative power of research breakthroughs, so central to UCL’s mission and ethos.”