The Brief

I don’t remember the first time I watched Harry Potter. I just remember being a bit scared and excited. Harry Potter was my first Haloween costume, I wore the robe like a dressing gown year-round.

The robes, the houses, the feasts, the corridors. The comfort of it. Like coming home to a place you’d never actually been. And that’s the energy we channelled into launching Hogwarts Legacy, a campaign that wasn’t just about a game. It was about belonging.

Warner Bros. Games handed us their biggest release in years and said: Make it magical. Make it massive. Make it matter.

And I thought, right. Easy. No pressure. Haha.

We were asked to introduce Hogwarts Legacy to the UK loudly, visually, emotionally. It wasn’t just another franchise launch. It was the first time you could walk the halls, roam the grounds, cast the spells, and become the student. Open-world RPG. Four houses. Millions of expectations.

But the trick was that we weren’t just selling nostalgia to 30-year-olds with well-worn box sets. We were inviting a whole new generation to pick a house, pick a side, and pick up the controller.

We needed a campaign that felt as immersive as the game. That turned cities into scavenger hunts. That gave people a reason to look up from their phones and say, “Wait. Was that the Hufflepuff bus?”

Research & Strategic Context

The core idea was not to market the game. Market the identity. Because once someone says “I’m a Slytherin,” they’re not talking about gameplay, they’re talking about themselves.

This campaign wasn’t just about pushing a release date, it was about unlocking the gorgeous nostalgia the Harry Potter Universe is known for, aligning with house pride, and creating the kind of street-level magic fans would physically chase.

So we asked: What does it feel like to belong to a house?

It feels tribal. Warm. A bit smug, if you’re a Ravenclaw. A bit chaotic, if you’re a Gryffindor. It feels like choosing your family, if your family wore robes and sent owls.

From there, we broke the strategy into four ideas:

OOH as Easter egg: Four house buses. Fully wrapped. Moving across the UK like magical beasts on wheels. People hunted them. We had Reddit threads and tweets and TikToks and people swearing the Ravenclaw one didn’t exist. (It did. She was just shy.)
Tiny, tactile fandom: We designed house-themed Christmas cards for GAME UK. You could only get them in store. They became mini-merch. Pocket-sized proof of allegiance. Perfect for gift-giving or passive-aggressive declarations over Christmas dinner.
Wizarding Wednesdays: A weekly lore-meets-promo email drop. My job? Make sure every word sounded like Hogwarts, not LinkedIn. And that all legal copy snuck in like a Hogsmeade smuggler—undetectable but effective.
Creative control meets chaos management: With assets flying everywhere—from bus rears to D96s to animated Supersides—I wrangled the creative threads into one cohesive tapestry. Everything passed the “Would a fan screenshot this?” test. If not, we rewrote it.

Fans weren’t being sold to. They were being summoned.

The Work (aka: my horcruxes)

The House Buses
Four buses. Four houses. These were huge, rolling banners of colour, crest, and pride. I oversaw the creative, the rounds, the rollout. People chased them through cities. I saw one girl on TikTok say she waited three hours for Ravenclaw. That’s either loyalty or lunacy.

Out-of-Home Wonderland
I adapted static assets for every OOH format imaginable—D48s, Supersides, T-sides, full bus rears, Tube placements. Each one had to be legal-safe but still magical. I worked between creative, media, and vendors to make sure everything looked like a spell, not a spreadsheet.

Retail Fandom, in Card Form
The Christmas cards were a personal favourite. I wrote them to match the house personalities—clever, kind, cunning, brave. They were quirky and gorgeous and oddly emotional. A tiny gift to fans who’d waited years to feel seen again.

Wizarding Wednesdays Emails
This was the glue. Weekly fan-first emails with exclusive content and cheeky competitions. Every line was on-brand, lore-friendly, and colour-matched to house palettes. I was the one checking the CTAs weren’t cringe, the disclaimers were legal, and the tone felt like it came from someone in the common room.