When Helen Rhodes returned to the UK after six years in the US, it was not the easy homecoming she had imagined. In her time abroad, she had acclimatised to life on the West Coast, working in a powerhouse of American advertising – Wieden & Kennedy Portland – on one of the most American of brands: fast-food chain KFC.
Rhodes’ days of cycling alongside the Willamette river to brainstorm ideas in a gigantic nest, before nipping down to 5th Avenue for lunch from a food cart, were exchanged for taking a packed bus past the Westfield shopping centre from her new home in West London to promote a venerable but embattled British institution – the BBC – during one of the most perilous periods in its history.
The pressure is steep: after being appointed deputy executive creative director of the broadcaster’s in-house agency, BBC Creative, in 2019, she quickly stepped up to succeed Laurent Simon as ECD when he left for VMLY&R at the end of the year.
“I had the same culture shock coming back [to the UK] as I did going to America,” Rhodes recalls. “Those first few weeks I had to take a load of paracetamol and lie down.”
She blames her sore head on the jet lag, but it must also have come, in part, from the task in front of her. “The BBC realises it has to change, modernise and be more relevant,” she says. “We’re not the market leader any more – the competition is so fierce. We once had a more captive audience, but that time has gone.”
Rhodes is now more than a year into her job, much of that time coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, BBC Creative turned five in January, and Rhodes says the agency’s role of communicating the value of the BBC’s public service and reaching new audiences has never been more vital.
To achieve that aim, Rhodes and her team may need to take a more unorthodox approach within an institution sometimes resistant to change.
Like most Brits, Rhodes grew up watching and listening to the BBC’s TV and radio content. Her mother was a drama teacher, while her father ran a timber company. Her dad is called Bill Board, “so I was destined to work in advertising”, Rhodes jokes.
As a child, Rhodes loved to draw and paint and, having graduated with a degree in art and media, she enrolled in The Watford Course at West Herts College where she teamed up with Matt Lever (now creative chief of BMB).
After cutting their teeth at TBWA, Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R and DLKW, Rhodes and Lever were offered a job at one of the world’s best agencies: Wieden & Kennedy Portland. In 2013 they embarked on their US adventure, but “it was a real culture shock”, Rhodes says. She explains that it took her about a year in Portland to hit her stride, which came with the chance to work on KFC. “KFC was such a fun account. It was a real collaboration [with the client].”
Rhodes has a sharp sense of humour. This emerged in her KFC campaigns, which involved brand mascot Colonel Sanders taking on various guises such as head of an NFL team and Santa’s substitute. She also created work for Samsung and TurboTax.
"We’re not the market leader any more – the competition is so fierce. We once had a more captive audience, but that time has gone"
Lever, who came back to London in 2015, says of Rhodes: “She takes the work very seriously indeed, but doesn’t take herself too seriously at all.”
Soon, the pull to return home was too strong to resist for Rhodes, too. When she accepted the role at BBC Creative, her first in-house job, it was entering a transition period. Modelled after the celebrated 4Creative, the agency launched in 2016, led by Simon and Aidan McClure, and gradually took on responsibility for all the broadcaster’s campaigns.
At first, BBC Creative’s work flew under the radar. The turning point came with its 2017 award-winning, stop-motion Christmas ad, called “The supporting act”, which signalled its creative intent.
After more progress and creative standouts, such as BBC Two’s rebrand, McClure left for Wonderhood Studios, the company founded by ex-Channel 4 CEO David Abraham. Then Simon, too, was lured back to ad agency life, joining VMLY&R London. And so BBC Creative entered a new era and Rhodes took the helm.
The BBC was facing numerous challenges in a heated political environment. In January, the National Audit Office warned the BBC faces an uncertain future because it relies heavily on the licence fee, and its audience share is falling. For three of the past five years, the BBC’s costs have outstripped its income. This is partly down to fewer households buying TV licences, as viewers migrate to streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+. Even though the BBC has expanded through iPlayer and a collaboration with ITV on the Britbox platform, the watchdog said it has been “slow to change’’ and still has no central strategy for tackling the drop in younger viewers.
In March, the BBC announced that BBC Three will return as a broadcast channel in 2022, with a focus on younger audiences. This is a reversal from its decision to move the channel online in 2016, when the corporation argued that younger people had abandoned terrestrial viewing.
Fighting for the future
Then there is the ongoing licence fee war: critics and government ministers want to defund the BBC, arguing that it is politically biased and “crowds out” commercial rivals. They also say that non-payment of the fee should be decriminalised. A licence fee review is set for 2022, ahead of a full-blown negotiation in 2027, when the charter is due for renewal.
Tim Davie, BBC director-general since last year, has been outspoken about its need to better understand its audiences and to extend its centre of gravity beyond London into the UK’s nations and regions.
“We’ve got a tough five years ahead,” Justin Bairamian, director of BBC Creative, says. “Our work has got to be better, we’ve got to reach out to audiences and make sure they know [the BBC] is relevant. Our success will be how audiences feel about the BBC.”
One way Rhodes is tackling this problem is by employing the irreverent humour that became her signature in her work abroad. Her first Christmas campaign at the BBC, in 2019, was a fast-paced spot showing people living their best “Xmas life”. This amounted to a pyjama-clad woman destroying avocados with a giant gingerbread man and a cat riding on top of a vacuum cleaner, instead of the typical festive advertising tropes.
Last year, the BBC released a campaign to position iPlayer as a rival to the streaming giants. Social-media videos presented wacky scenarios such as EastEnders character Ian Beale suspended in the sky and a miniature gymnast swinging from RuPaul’s earrings.
“We like the idea that we’re not taking our content that seriously – there’s some fun to be had with it,” Rhodes says. “The BBC does poke fun at itself and our marketing and communications should also do that.”
The iPlayer campaign was native to social media, where the BBC has been slow to find its feet. This approach was intended to reach younger audiences but it was also about being smarter with its media planning and budget. Rhodes adds: “In the past, we relied on our own channels a bit too much but a lot of audiences we need to reach aren’t on our channels.
“The bigger players, as well as gaming and social media, have bigger budgets. You can’t outspend them, so we have to find other ways to hopefully outsmart them. That could be a TV ad but also a special build, a stunt or a social post.”
As well as having a bigger presence on digital channels, BBC Creative is clarifying what sets the broadcaster apart from its competitors. “[The BBC] is part of the fabric of the UK and part of culture,” Rhodes says. “It’s about doing work that gets talked about in the real world. As long as we’re part of the cultural conversation, we’re doing something right.”
At the start of 2021, BBC Creative illustrated the organisation’s place in that conversation with a film that reshaped its acronym to make statements about its wide-reaching cultural role – whether by offering “bad boy charm”, “breathless bedroom couples” or “barely bearable cliffhangers”, it concluded “whatever you’re into, there’s a BBC for all of us”.
But being relevant isn’t just about making people laugh, and for the BBC, this is a difficult line to tread. Its public-service role came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic. The broadcaster devoted extensive news coverage to the crisis, as well as providing educational content for children when schools were closed, and was lauded for its efforts. “BBC services were the most-used sources of news and information about Covid-19, well ahead of others, and were consistently considered the most important,” Ofcom’s report said.
Under Rhodes, BBC Creative has helped the broadcaster respond to rapidly changing events and keep its finger on the pulse of the nation. “We went through all the emotions with the whole of the UK,” she says.
During the first lockdown, BBC Creative repurposed footage from comedy shows such as The Mighty Boosh and I’m Alan Partridge to urge people to stay at home – while also eliciting laughs. Subsequent hopeful and uplifting messages included a film in which news presenters imagined a time when the pandemic would end, a poem read by Idris Elba and a singalong among neighbours.
Additionally, it provided practical support and started important conversations during a year that brought the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and a renewed scrutiny on the diversity of organisations. It partnered Gal-dem and The Face to create content about sexual consent, following Michaela Coel’s TV series I May Destroy You, and it developed an educational content programme about black history to coincide with Steve McQueen’s Small Axe film series.
Such initiatives signal a new direction of travel for the BBC more generally. Besides younger people, the broadcaster needs to do more to appeal to audiences from minority-ethnic backgrounds and those in lower socioeconomic groups, Ofcom’s report warned.
This has also been noted by Davie, who said at the Royal Television Society’s digital convention last year that the BBC needs to improve the diversity of its own staff to better represent diverse audiences.
BBC Creative’s leadership is conscious of this issue, too, and keen to broaden the agency’s reach across underrepresented groups, including outside London’s media bubble. Before Rhodes joined, Bairamian set up a team in Salford, Greater Manchester, recruiting “people who wouldn’t have worked for the BBC in London” and much of its work has been led out of that office, such as the Fifa World Cup campaign in 2018.
BBC Creative will look to set up more teams in regions where the BBC has plans to expand, such as Newcastle and Birmingham. “We’re doing work to make sure our teams in London and Salford are more diverse, but also reaching out to communities that might not even consider advertising as a career and give them opportunities,” Bairamian explains. This will be a big focus for Rhodes, who adds: “It will make the work better.”
In March, the agency launched BBC Creative U, an educational programme aimed at improving the diversity of talent entering the ad industry. The free, 10-week course will teach skills such as strategy, art direction and copywriting, and be open to ethnic-minority candidates aged 18 and older.
Despite the services it provided during 2020, the events brought about by Covid have put even more pressure on the BBC. As Ofcom noted: “Covid-19 has actually accelerated the trend of audiences spending more of their viewing time with online and streaming services… The number of people engaging with the BBC has continued to fall across nearly all BBC services, and at a faster rate among young people.”
While Rhodes has helped to bring some levity to the organisation, it was striking that one of BBC Creative’s first campaigns in 2021 struck a more serious note. A film for BBC News reassured disenchanted young people: “The future’s not cancelled.” Rhodes and her team have a steep hill to climb to help ensure it’s not cancelled for the corporation, either.
Helen Rhodes: five campaigns that made me
Morrisons: 'The truth'
This is the film that got Matt and me hired at W&K Portland. A humorous, surreal take on Christmas, which moved away from the supermarket’s previous celebrity campaigns and took a more creative approach.
KFC: 'The real Colonel'
Like James Bond, Colonel Sanders was too big a character for one man to bring to life. We reintroduced him to the world with Darrell Hammond, Norm McDonald, Jim Gaffigan, Rob Riggle and Billy Zane.
RXBar: launch campaign
The protein bar had a no-bullshit attitude, so we made a poster campaign to match. We also made a social campaign with a hotline for people to get all the bullshit in their lives off their chest, and we animated the best.
BBC iPlayer: 'Wasted on some'
The first campaign I ECDd at BBC Creative. Written by Andy Parkman and creative directed by Becca Pottinger. Great dialogue and performances.
BBC iPlayer: 'Valentine’s like nowhere else'
Musical comedy duo Flo and Joan took over iPlayer’s Twitter feed on Valentine’s Day. Using power ballads they urged people with lockdown love woes to fall in love with shows on iPlayer.
A spokesperson from the BBC responds to the suggestion it has an uncertain future:
"The BBC is the most used media organisation in the UK with an average of 5 million people using us every single minute of the day and night. Throughout the last year, we have supported the nation through TV, radio and online with 91% of adults across the UK using our services each week.
“We are committed to providing great content for all audiences and continue to see record-breaking figures for iPlayer, with over 5.8 billion programme requests last year. We are also bringing back BBC Three as a broadcast channel to deliver best value to all.
“As the NAO report made clear, we have made significant savings and increased efficiencies, while maintaining our spending on content.”
Editor's note – a comment from the BBC was added to this story after publication.