Philanthropy Partnerships

Making two brands mean something together — when the partner isn't talent and you can't brief them.

Sky partnered with The Ocean Cleanup, and the money was real and growing. What existed to represent it was essentially a receipt — a figure, and the fact of the partnership.

A philanthropy partnership isn't an endorsement deal. The partner isn't talent. You can't write them a brief or ask them to adapt their voice. Both organisations already mean something specific to their own people, and the work is finding what is genuinely true of both — then building something that lets an audience participate rather than just observe.

I rebuilt the giving-back experience around the work rather than the total: what The Ocean Cleanup actually does, where the systems are deployed, what has been collected, what the money went to, and why any of it matters.

The bet was about this specific community. Sky's players are unusually values-driven and unusually suspicious of anything that feels like marketing wearing a cause as a costume. Given a number, they would have asked what it bought. Given the substance, they had a reason to care — and a reason to believe the studio meant it.

The 2025 partnership film came out of the same thinking: less announcement, more evidence. I wrote the script; Jimmy Seargeant cut it.