It was an honour to be selected as the agency to create the new recruitment campaign for Suffolk Police. Their ambition to attract new officers from the communities where we live – and deliver front line services back to those communities – is one we’re extremely proud to be part of. With everyone involved agreeing it needed to be something that ‘broke the mould’, we used insight to create and deliver a pioneering campaign that continues to massively exceed expectations.
An Insight-Led Strategy
Several in-depth Discovery sessions with teams from Suffolk Police, along with competitor research in the public and private sector, plus one-to-one conversations with serving officers, gave us phenomenal insight to work with. It revealed every Suffolk officer joined for one of two reasons: “Wanting a life change” or “Wanting to change lives”. We also found a significant number of people who would be suitable for the role would have never even considered a career in Suffolk police. This meant it was vital we built a campaign driven by the motivations of officers, to reach as many people as possible.
A Disruptive Creative
With cross-industry competition for candidates we needed to stand out. Whilst the two flavours of typical police recruitment have their place (smiling officers walking along a high street, or night raids like a scene from CSI), they weren’t going to get us the results in a digital-first campaign. By identifying other visual associations, we developed “The New Recruit Finder” to find and speak directly to the people they were looking for. The bold, disruptive animation, combined with the focus group driven messaging, created a campaign that really cut through the noise.
Exceeding Expectations
Our campaign came to life online with targeted media across Meta, LinkedIn and Spotify, and to broaden awareness we extended the campaign offline with a large OOH presence across Suffolk, including billboards, posters, collateral for community policing teams, and an engaging experience for recruitment events.
