HI THERE

We’re excited to have the chance to share a little about what Lucky Generals is all about.
You are a mystery to us at this point, but we look forward to hopefully speaking soon.
No doubt you are extremely busy, so we’ve put together this small site for ease.
And we’ve included some previous missions that we hope are of interest to you.
If there is anything else that’d be helpful to share, please just shout.

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?

Universal studios set to open its first park in 20 years, which is a huge deal for them. It’s promised to the be the most immersive theme park in the universe, inviting people to step into portals to enter five truly immersive worlds that go beyond your imagination.  

 We were tasked with crafting a global campaign platform for the launch of Epic Universe that would ladder up to that promise, ignite a mass audience, and have the mouse down the street quaking in his yellow boots. 

Universal has a complex audience, one that goes beyond their Global markets. We had to be able to connect with unique communities - the fandoms of the IPs in the park but also the thrill seekers, and the family vacation planners, the ‘girls trip’ goers. And even the retailers like Expedia.

 We needed to find the one thing that unites all these audiences to land on an idea that would be meaningful to the masses, yet able to flex to the specific. That audience uniting insight – a passion for discovery. Our vast and varied audience consider themselves Explorers. They share a curiosity and imagination that has them open to the unknown, yearning for rich stories and lasting memories, and eager for experiences beyond the day-to-day. And with a brand promise to deliver just that we had all the ingredients for a captivating platform. 

We came up with the platform ‘You gotta see this’! The line at its simplest is a call to action. What makes it most meaningful is the promise that what lies beyond the portals of Epic Universe is so transformational you need to experience it for yourself in order to believe it.   

This is an all-media, all-fandoms, multiple market launch campaign created to encapsulate fan-first storytelling to make the biggest impact possible.  

To connect meaningfully with our specific fandoms, we worked hand-in-hand with Universal’s insights and comms planning teams to build out our consumer journeys and messaging strategies for those audiences.  

The first to know about the launch were the biggest fans - We dropped teasers on Social to lure them into the story early and get them excited and spreading the news for us – Epic Universe is coming May 2025.  

Next, we landed in culture to share what incredible worlds and IPs await, continuing to fan the flames. During the Paris Olympics Today Show presenters Melvin Craig and Al Roker entered a portal and ended up in The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic, revealing the MoM for the very first time. The remaining portals were then teased with short highly targeted films before the full campaign went live with the big reveal... 

We launch to the masses with four stories that tell the tales of four explorers who stumble upon our Epic portals and are brave enough to enter. With approval from Steven Spielberg, our films bring Universal cinematic storytelling to the small screen for the first time for Universal Orlando resort, launching this theme park with the grandeur it deserves. Check them out below.

On the first day of ticket sales the Universal Orlando Resort website crashed due to receiving three times more hits than projected. Ticket sales continue to stay strong as the campaign rolls out in order of engaged audiences – a fan-first approach. The mass awareness campaign has just launched in Jan 2025, with over 100 master assets, and we’re excited to see the response. 

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.

Inspired by what you see? That’s just the beginning.

We’d love to hear your thoughts, and about your latest missions.

Hollie Alexander, President US
+1-917-202-1996
hollie.alexander@luckygenerals.com

Ellen Corr, New Business Director US
+1-646-552-4510
ellen@luckygenerals.com