HI THERE

You must have been lucky enough to meet Hollie or Atheina at AdColor 2024 - how lucky are they!
And sounds like they’ve piqued your interest to learn a little bit more about us, Lucky Generals.

We know how many new faces you must have met over the past couple of days,
so we’ve put together this small site to share what we’re all about.
This includes some of our past missions so you can get feel for the type of work we get excited by.

Hopefully we’re lucky enough to continue the conversation.

OUR MISSION

Lucky Generals is a transatlantic creative agency based in London and NYC with just over 120 people spread across both sides of the Atlantic.

The day that the Founders launched the agency, they wrote down what they wanted the agency to be, on a rather unnecessarily large Post-it note, and it is still the reason we get out of bed in the morning.  

The goal is to be “a creative company for people on a mission.”

This is an enduring and very deliberate statement of intent, made up of two key elements:

A Creative Company…

While we can make a killer ad, we know that the solution to every business challenge is different and requires creative thinking beyond advertising. Which is why we are set up to deliver a broader definition of creativity and ensure that our solutions are inventive, bold and media neutral. We seek to build brands that are culturally resonant and never confined to spots and space.

For People on a Mission…

Every mission is different. We are restless, hugely ambitious and results oriented. We want people to do things, not just feel things when they see our work. We want to turn the tides for your brand, and how your audience thinks of you. More than a vendor, we are your partner in bringing your vision to life. When we ask clients “what’s your mission?”, we love it when their eyes light up, their speech quickens, and they hammer their fists on the table.

Is that you?

We are incredibly proud to have created four successful Amazon Super Bowl commercials. Two of which have even been nominated for an Emmy.

We were given the challenge of using the Super Bowl to show just how useful and helpful Alexa is for customers.

Rather than simply list off all the rational reasons the Alexa is superior to the competition, we asked a simple question: What would happen if Alexa lost her voice? Could anyone possibly replace her?

The campaign was declared winner of USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter, Ad Age’s Super Bowl Ranking and YouTube’s AdBlitz.

We then went on to create three more Super Bowl campaigns, all with the aim of showing the more human side of the brand. To keep raising the creative bar each year, we’ve asked ourselves increasingly hilarious ‘what if’ questions about Alexa.

To make an impact over the holidays, we needed to get consumers to see Amazon’s brand as one of emotion, not just function.

So, we hit upon a simple and universal insight:
Amazon doesn’t just deliver cardboard packages, it puts smiles on people’s faces, all over the world.  

We made Amazon’s iconic packages and one of their most iconic assets - their logo - the hero of the campaign.
The logo had previously been portrayed as an arrow from A-Z, but we took the 'arrow' and animated it to make it into a human smile.

And the results certainly made us smile - in terms of sales, this campaign was Amazon’s most effective ever.
Amazon’s Q4 sales increased by $27bn globally over the three years that the campaign ran.
But, best of all, the Amazon smile is now used on every piece of Amazon advertising all over the world. 

The 2021 Holiday season bought a new set of challenges.

Things were still tough post-covid, and we knew we needed to find a new approach to the festive season that would resonate.

We chose to tell the story of a young woman who is struggling with getting back to normal life, and showcase how it is the small acts of kindness that have the biggest impacts.

We worked with the Diversity Standards Collective to engage with black women from the US and Europe who were living with anxiety to ensure we accurately represented their lived experience. The DSC said it was the most emotional reaction they’ve ever had and stated, ‘it’s refreshing, and promising, to have these big influential brands recognize the importance of telling diverse stories in a way that resonates and paves the way for more of a variety of stories to share the spotlight.

We started working with Virgin Atlantic in 2021, and from the start, the conversation was much bigger than comms. Our task was to create a global platform that could inform absolutely everything the brand does; from product, to people, to customer experience.

Drawing on the airline’s heritage of challenging the status quo, we set about establishing a brand platform that would feed the business’s genuine desire to do things differently.

This was captured in the platform ‘See the world differently’.

It has inspired a fresh take on the world of travel, driven tangible policy change, and changed the onboard experience. To bring the platform to life in communications at launch, we focused on the one the thing that, above all, that makes Virgin Atlantic different.

The amazing people - customer and crew - who fly their own path.

‘See the World Differently’ is an idea that has galvanized the whole business and raised the bar for everything Virgin Atlantic does. It acts as a rallying cry to do things more creatively and differently from the competition, it has been consistently applied and has led Virgin Atlantic to taking on bolder and braver decisions, breaking category norms.

It has set a standard for their tangible actions which is evident in the number of industry firsts since the platform launched. This includes relaxing their tattoo policy, becoming the only British airline to allow their crew to show off their ink to the world, and taking on the challenge (successfully!) of flying the first 100% flight with Sustainable Aviation Fuel across the Atlantic. 

One piece of activity we're particularly proud of is the work we did with Virgin Atlantic to remove the requirement for colleagues to wear gendered uniform options. The crew now have the freedom to choose the uniform that they feel most comfortable in, and which best represents who they truly are.

We brought this policy change to life, with a ‘Runway on a Runway’: a fashion shoot at an airfield, where the iconic uniforms were modeled by crew, non-binary influencers, dancers and Drag Race sensation, Michelle Visage.

The activity dominated the headlines with over 2000 pieces of coverage globally, and an earned reach of over 4.6 billion. Not only that, but the campaign, which some would inevitably disparage as ‘woke’, achieved 96% positive PR sentiment, receiving 20 - 30 pieces of positive coverage for every negative.

Since the platform launched, Virgin Atlantic has regained its #2 position in Brand Power for the first time in 2 years, there has been a 43% uplift in website traffic and 16% more bookings via the website vs the same period in 2019. Applications to work at the airline have doubled, and we’ve seen significant rises in salience, difference and meaning scores. And we’re just getting started.