Celebrating Cow and its favourite creative campaigns over the past two decades

Happy Birthday Cow.

As indie creative agency Cow celebrates its 20th birthday this month, Creative Moment invited Mark Perkins to reflect on how agency life and creativity in PR has changed. The creative team has also picked its five favourite pieces of work over that time.

Twenty years ago, in November 2000, Cow opened for business.

It was still an analogue world: fewer than 1 in 4 UK households had internet access, the majority of people still communicated via landline phones and print media ruled. When we started, we distributed work via fax machines and couriers; now we’re making TikToks.

Co-founder Sian Morgan’s key principle, unusual in PR at the time, was to put creativity first.

We wanted to make work that was measured in more than column inches. Our belief, which – like Sian - remains to this day, is that smart ideas can help to solve complex business and social problems.

At that time PR was principally bracketed as media relations and reputation management. Creative directors in PR didn’t exist.

We were among the first to create the specialist role in 2008; today we have three hugely experienced CDs. We tried to change the perception that the creative was restricted to a news story (usually a survey) and an accompanying image (normally an attractive female celebrity!) to pitch to print and broadcast media.

News editors had the power to decide whether your client campaign was a hit or a miss. If they didn’t run your idea it had nowhere else to go. Their power has waned as increasingly we’ll break work on digital channels, maybe with video produced in-house, sometimes through an influencer instead for unedited engagement.

Today, traditional media has become much more reactive, reporting on the conversation we’ve initiated rather than determining it.

For too long PR agencies were at the bottom of the food chain in brand marketing. 

Almost always, the brief was to ‘amplify the ad’ with the creative already set in stone. That was irrespective of whether the ATL (above the line) was of little media or public interest or a complete dud. (Such as the racehorse purchased by a biscuit brand which, it transpired, was unable to race due to anxiety triggered by other horses).

Now we’ll often get the same brief and it is a case of ‘best idea wins’. 

With clients looking for the best ROI and efficiencies, and for an idea to translate across channels for earned media results, that’s suddenly put PR creatives in pole position – especially as most of us now produce content in-house.

We’ve always interrogated an idea with the simple question, ‘Will anyone actually give a shit?’.

In an age when consumers are scanning through news and social feeds at hyper speed, the ability to ‘create clickbait’, to tap into trends and topicality, grab attention and stop thumbs with an arresting headline and content has never been more valuable.

We’ve also been fortunate enough to work with the likes of Google, Disney, Tesco, Santander and Heinz, so when Creative Moment asked us to select five favourite campaigns from the past 20 years, that inevitably led to internal ‘creative tensions’.

What about the time we parked a Removal Van Persie outside the Emirates when RVP left Arsenal? The TV Binge hotel with Three Mobile and Netflix? The Run For Your Bun ‘pay by exercise’ café? When we brought the Green Cross Code Man out of his 30-year retirement for MORE TH>N? Or the Simon Armitage poem engraved on a pioneering pill for the Institute of Cancer Research? Spanish lessons with Vinnie Jones? And so on.

Anyway, we can’t have them all. 

Here’s our final five, based both on the memorable impact they had at the time and the pleasure we took in creating them.

Mark Perkins is a creative director at Cow. He was at the agency from 2000-2012, recently returning to the herd in the summer of 2020.