Inside Channel 4’s Game-Changing Paralympic Campaigns

Channel 4 has been the official UK broadcaster of the Paralympic Games since 2012, and every year their campaigns for the Games keep getting better.

For their 2024’s ‘Considering What’ campaign, they worked with Purple Goat to make sure they created something truly progressive that changed the narrative of the Paralympics for the better. The campaign was an absolute success, and it shows how powerful working with the Disabled community can be.

Our Global Client Director, Dom Hyams, sat down with James Hamilton, former Head of Planning at Channel 4, to talk about these game changing campaigns and how working with the community changed the game for them.

Learn more about how Purple Goat can help your brand by checking our inclusive marketing services.

[Transcript below]

Trailer (00:00):

Dom Hyams:

You have literally been eat, sleep, breathing Paralympic representation, but also wider thinking about through the lens of inclusion and disability in your work.

James Hamilton:

Can’t ignore the fact that this is disabled sport and it becomes a campaign about disabled sport. So obviously it’s intrinsic to the Paralympics. We are much more likely now, I think, to treat diversity and inclusion in our comms as just being another part of it and another thing that we think about, as opposed to something that we bolt on at the end. So an input at the start rather than something that we think of as an output. And it was something that I don’t think we would’ve been able to achieve as authentically as we did without involving that Disabled community in the way that we made it.

Introduction (00:53):

Dom Hyams:

Hello and welcome to the Purple Goat podcast. Today I’m joined by James Hamilton, Head of Planning at Channel 4. James and the team have been working with us over the last few years to create the most forward thinking and progressive Paralympic campaigns out there in the world. And today we talk about that journey, and it’s really awesome to hear the kind of work that Channel 4 have been doing behind the scenes from the ground up to drive inclusivity and accessibility into absolutely everything they do.

We wanted to do this session really to talk about what we’ve done in 2024 with some of the most prominent brands that we’ve worked with, but then also look forward and what the work that we’ve done in 2024 means for 2025 and beyond. So as a kind of way of starting off, it’d be great if you don’t mind just introducing yourself and explaining a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how we’ve worked together.

James Hamilton:

Okay, so I’m James Hamilton. I run planning at Channel 4, very specifically the more kind of marketing and creative communications side of planning there. I’ve been there for a long time, 12 years, and as part of that I’ve worked on the Paralympics since 2016. So I’ve been responsible for writing the creative brief and helping with the marketing strategies of, well, three summer Paralympics and I think three winter Paralympics. But yeah, a lot of Paralympics in that 12 years.

Dom Hyams:

Before you jumped into the world of Paralympics with Channel 4, was either the Paralympics or kind of inclusive representation in media on your radar as a thing, would you say?

James Hamilton:

Paralympics were definitely in that. We had tickets to London 2012 and I went there with my two, at the time, tiny twin babies. I have lots of fond memories of London 2012. Diversity and inclusion… probably back then I used to work in advertising. I worked at a bunch of different advertising agencies and it was starting to bubble up on the radar, but it wasn’t something that many of our clients were, I don’t think actively thinking about at the time.

Dom Hyams:

And now, would you say you have literally been eat, sleep, breathing, Paralympic representation, but also wider thinking about through the lens of inclusion and disability in your work. This is such a broad question, but I suppose if you were going to take that 12 years and say what are some of the key things that you’ve learned that you didn’t know beforehand, what would you say some of those are?

James Hamilton:

That’s a good question. I think there’s probably two ways I’d look at that and one which is the Paralympics itself is a thing. It is a very separate thing, and it is obviously, it is impossible to do. Well, actually we did explore this, we did think about this and I remember talking to you about this at the time, but we did explore whether you would even address diversity and inclusion and the word disability as part of Paralympics advertising.

What if you were to completely blank that out and just treat it the way the BBC treated the Olympics if you were to do a campaign that just sort of focused on the Arc De Triumph, the Eiffel Tower for Paris 24, and you just did it as a traditional sports ad, but I think we quickly realised in conversation with you and your team and the people we worked with that you can’t ignore the fact that this is disabled sport and it becomes a campaign about disabled sports. So obviously it’s intrinsic to the Paralympics.

I think the second point that I alluded to back before I started meandering it was that we are much more likely now, I think, to treat diversity and inclusion in our comms as just being another part of it, and another thing that we think about as opposed to something that we bolt on at the end. So an input at the start rather than something that we think of as an output.

Dom Hyams:

Would you say that you’re seeing that being reflected across other Channel 4 output now in a way that 12 years ago maybe you didn’t quite see it the same? In the sense of regardless of what the programming is now, regardless of what is being cooked up, even if it’s obviously outside of disability and inclusion and Paralympics, there is that input of inclusive thinking even if it’s small that wasn’t previously there maybe 12 years ago?

James Hamilton:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, and it is not just Channel 4. I mean I think TV in general, it’s not there yet. It’s not perfect by any means, but it is definitely getting better at diversity, at inclusion, at authentic representation in casting, certainly onscreen. I think we’ve done a huge amount at Channel 4 offscreen from a production perspective, on the type of people that we’re trying to bring into the industry to make sure that we are as representative as possible. It is night and day to when I first joined the industry for sure.

Dom Hyams:

Nice. And when you think about the impact of your work, and again being in and around this for 12 years already, we often talk about there being kind of a penny drop moment where you can visibly see or feel the power of inclusive work that we do or we work or we put our name to. Have you got any kind of standout moments, maybe from this last 2024 Paralympics of when you knew you’d kind of hit something that worked and you could see the impact it was having on the people that was seeing it?

James Hamilton:

I think there are two big moments there. I feel like there’s two for everything to these answers, but there was one when you were there, you and your team were there when we first presented the insight and the tracking research that we did at a kickoff session, and this would be, I’m going to say like late 2022, I mean it’s a long gestation period for a Paralympics campaign and we presented that stat that the key driver that made people want to watch the Paralympics was this idea of seeing disabled people overcome their disability.

And we presented that data in the room as if, “and that’s our key driver, and that sort of an interesting bit of data, isn’t it”. And there was that audible intake of breath in the room and at that moment we, I realised right there and then that was the strategic hook that we would want to hang on. And the term insight is banded around in my industry with a sort of want and abandon and I’ve had probably three or four genuine insights in, I think, in my life and that was one of them, one of the really strong ones where you go, okay, right. Yeah, there’s something really in that.

Now I don’t know whether that was, I couldn’t say at that moment quite how that would land with the public and how it would land as a wider campaign, but I knew that that’s what we wanted to hang our hats on. Challenging that.

And I think, again, I can’t speak for the countless millions that watched the Paralympics or saw our campaign, but I look at the press and I look at the publicity around what we did and if I look at the noise that came out around Superhumans compared to the kind of publicity that we got, particularly from the Disabled community around Considering what?, and it was just sort of wholly positive around Considering what?.

This idea that people felt seen, that their experience felt seen, that we really were challenging something and challenging viewers to think differently about disabled sport. And that was incredibly heartening and without bigging you up too much, being a non-disabled person, it was something that was very difficult for me to get my head around until I saw it through the eyes of right back at that original planning session. And it was something that I don’t think we would’ve been able to achieve as authentically as we did without involving that Disabled community in the way that we made it.

Dom Hyams:

I remember at that session I prodded when that was being shown on the screen, I was prodding my colleague and then we snuck a photo of the insight and the thing because in that moment it was the thing, like you say, that was the aha moment of “oh my word, that insight is shockingly powerful”.

And we have those moments a lot where you work with a brand and you say to them, actually, if we do this piece of insight, we are going to be able to push something further. We’re going to be able to do something different and actually more creative than we might have otherwise been able to do. Because the insight gives us the mandate, it gives us the ability to go, well look, we’re following the rabbit hole of reality and that can take us into some weird, wonderful but really exciting places as well.

James Hamilton:

It’s just a really powerful truth, isn’t it? You start picking at it and unravelling it and you realise that there’s something in this. And so we took that idea of, okay, so we actually had a brief that rather than say something about the Paralympics, we wanted people watching to feel something and we wanted people to feel uncomfortable with whatever we made. Now the rest of the brief didn’t just say make viewers feel uncomfortable.

There was a whole lot of, well, why do you want to make people feel uncomfortable and what’s the problem and what’s the solution that this communications is going to provide? And that was obviously that a predominantly non-disabled audience watches disabled sport for this idea of overcoming, for that kind of, people sort of talked about disability porn a lot in the discourse that we explored around this.

And we spoke to a bunch of Paralympians, present and former, about it and we spoke to you and your community about it, and we got to this place in that brief that I’m picking that insight or that truth gets you to this place of, well, these are athletes like any other athletes and nobody talks about other athletes are overcoming anything.

Nobody talks about a premiership footballer going, “oh, it’s amazing what he does, but considering he comes from a sort of single parent family”. And I think it was really noteworthy that someone like Farra didn’t mention his trafficked past until he had retired, until it became something that was, his legacy was absolutely solidly in place. He didn’t want that idea of any kind of pity watch.

And so we kept pulling at that and going, well, okay, so what, you’ve got this idea of overcome, we want our non-disabled audience to overcome these patronising ideas about disability and how do we do that? Well, what are disabled athletes overcoming if they’re not overcoming their disability? Because obviously they can’t, it’s just who they are, what are they overcoming? And it was the same things that all athletes are trying to overcome. Time, gravity, friction or those sort of fundamental forces that are trying to prevent you from being as good as you can be

Dom Hyams:

If you take the impact of 2024 and you try and predict what that will have for the, I say the industry, but I mean I suppose both the impact on the inclusive conversation in media and advertising, but also the impact of Paralympics moving forward in the way that they’re broadcast the coverage in it around it. What would you say you think the impact of 2024 hopefully would be?

James Hamilton:

Well, hopefully it would, at a sort of Paralympics in particular and disability in general perspective, I hope it has challenged some of those patronising views. It has encouraged people to think slightly differently. I don’t think it’s job done. I don’t think you can just do that with a single campaign or in a single category like the Paralympics and say, “oh, we’ve done that now and we need to move on”. I think it’s a thread that I would keep picking at and keep working at because I think it’s a really powerful truth to explore. I think it’s as a sort of a wider learning.

I think that idea of being slightly confrontational in the way that you present these questions, these issues is important that we shouldn’t pat around these things. Like if the prevailing attitude or perspective towards, in this case disability, but there’s obviously there’s a whole raft of diversity and inclusion targets that we could look at.

But if the way to attack that is to be a little bit more, not aggressive, but to be a little bit more confrontational and challenging in the way that you either present people’s views back to them or encourage them to think about things in a different way, then I’d totally encourage it. And I think that’s possibly something that we could learn and apply and other brands could apply.

Dom Hyams:

And is that something that you professionally will probably take forward? Just almost adding that bit of spice, the conversations to get people doing that same bit of self, well, I suppose self-questioning, questioning their own choices and why they’re making them. And if there’s any kind of presumptions that are going on in the way that they’ve arrived at that idea, and actually almost just challenging that from the ground up.

James Hamilton:

I mean, yes, you always like to think that you are going into, if we’re talking professionally about me, you always like to think that you are challenging your preconceptions and whatever, that you come to these things with a sort of very open mind as an open slate and that you will park any prejudices you have and preconceptions at the door.

I mean, that takes work, that’s not something. I mean, we are an inherently lazy species, and we will come to those things with a preconceived idea of what the answer is. But yeah, I mean I’d love to think that it will at least make me sort of stop and question because that was for us, received wisdom for us for a while and we lent into that and it, it’s good to challenge these things.

Dom Hyams:

Do you think, and I’ve spoken about this with a few creatives before, but I find it fascinating that as an industry, if you go back to the days of Mad Men and when that was shot and the kind of head honcho advertising mogul in that world, they are applauded for their ability to get in the psyche of the common man as it were, and that level of empathy that is required to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and essentially think for them almost to create great work that obviously there is an element of having that natural empathy of sorts or ability to think how something is going to land with an audience.

But it’s fascinating that to me that in the time that I’ve been in the world of marketing and advertising, we’ve taken the shift away from sort of inherent empathy as this sort of golden ticket of ability to actually, it’s how you pull resources, communities, insights, and then digest that and then almost produce something with all of those inputs rather than it being just a sole sort of individual and what they do with their own mind as it were.

James Hamilton:

I mean, that’s definitely the case. I think I would sort of question Don Draper’s empathy, he’s more of a sociopath. I think and his ability to weaponise emotion. And advertising industry is, there are a lot of storied examples of campaigns that are very good at manipulating people into thinking or feeling and then behaving in a certain way.

But I agree, I think the days of the kind of lone gun slinger planner or creative who would sort of come in and go, here’s the answer, here’s what we do. I think those are arguably long gone. And the benefit that comes from a much more a sort of multiplicity of voices and backgrounds and experiences is generally, in my experience, better. I think there’s still a case for yeah, of course the occasional creative campaign.

I used to work at an agency called Fallon where the famous bouncing balls ad for Sony, there was no research, there was no strategy, there was nothing in that. It was just a creative vision. Somebody said, this will look good, it’ll sell a shed load of tellies. And it did. And anything that’s been said about that ad after the event is an imagination of how it was sold or how it was produced.

It is a very pure creative vision, but I think it is doing a very, very different job to the one that we are trying to do, or certainly the one that we were trying to do with the Paralympics. And I think that requires a much more nuanced, more just to understand and hear the different voices who are being represented there.

Dom Hyams:

And if you look forward to 2025 as an individual, I suppose, what do you want to carry forward from your experience on the Paras, but also the work maybe we’ve done together into what you are going to try and see. Almost like New Year’s resolution vibes in more what you’re going to bring into your work into 2025 based on what’s happened in 2024.

James Hamilton:

I think, as we said, not relying on tried and tested ways of doing things just because you think you understand them now. The Paralympics has been at Channel 4 for longer than it was at the BBC. It’s something that’s sort, we know inside out now. There’s always something new to find out about these things. There’s always another way in and another, perhaps, a more sort of powerful way to talk about these things. If you involve communities, if you get actually on the ground with people and talk to them about. Maybe I’ll be spending my time with bakers this year.

Dom Hyams:

And if you could sort of implore our listeners, our viewers, our community, our advertisers, to take one thing into 2025 themselves, what would that be?

James Hamilton:

I mean, see this as an opportunity. Let’s see diversity and inclusion not as something that you bolt on at the end of your campaign so that you can be seen to be delivering on some kind of corporate metrics, but see it as an opportunity to talk to a very valuable audience if you want to be sort of nakedly commercial about it, but also just it’s 2025. This is the world that we live in and the world that we see day in day out isn’t necessarily the one that is projected to us in marketing communications. And it would just be nice for things to just feel a little bit more realistic.

Dom Hyams:

I think you’re allowed to coin the phrase nakedly commercial now. That’s excellent. But yeah, I’ve never framed it in that way, but that’s great. It is true. We often talk about brands being commercial because it’s like a good growth opportunity, but we say, “oh, this is great growth opportunity”, but ‘nakedly commercial’, it says what it is on the tin. So we’ll have to put the title of something like that, A date about being nakedly commercial. But thank you so much.

James Hamilton:

Dom. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Dom Hyams:

And I look forward to seeing what the next 12 months brings you and we’ll no doubt catch up again very soon.

James Hamilton:

We will. We will. Thank you very much. See you soon.

Outro (23:47):

Dom Hyams:

Thanks so much for watching the podcast. We also want to thank our friends at ID Studios who so wonderfully host us for all of our podcasts. If you have any podcast needs yourself, we highly recommend them. Not only is their space inclusive, accessible, they are also just a great group of people. So please reach out and they will be more than happy to accommodate you.