Get Outside Inside was the perfect story for the time. It linked into the Coronavirus pandemic but with enough separation for it to have a light-hearted feel. The aim of the campaign was to call on people to stay indoors, to protect others, whilst encouraging them to get active.
Originally, Ordnance Survey came to us with a story about getting people outdoors. But with social distancing and instruction from the Government telling us to stay at home, the campaign had to be adapted. This time around, the aim was to break a record for how many people can step simultaneously.
Our media relations team sold into multiple radio and TV stations with the new, reworked story, targeting BBC and commercial, national and regional stations. With such a strong news agenda any non-pandemic stories had to have a lighter feel and a link to Coronavirus, so this story was perfect.
Coverage was phenomenal, even more so given Prime Minister Boris Johnson was still in hospital in intensive care, on the day of the story. To add to this the challenge of producing a multi-media broadcast campaign remotely. Everyone involved worked from home, our two spokespeople speaking to journalists by Skype or phone, supported by our producer who called the stations ahead of each interview to confirm times and briefed the spokespeople via text and email.
British Olympic sprinter Iwan Thomas, MBE, made a great spokesperson but we secured so many interviews in the end, he needed to be supported by a second spokesperson from Ordnance Survey too.
We secured an extensive amount of coverage despite the challenges we faced; the coverage stretched over 2 days! By the end of it all, we got 32 interviews with a reach of nearly 59 million listeners/viewers. This included 3 TV interviews, 6 national radio interviews and 15 BBC regional radio interviews.
You can watch our TV coverage below
And listen to our radio coverage here
