Alzheimer's Research UK appoints Above+Beyond as lead strategic and creative agency

Alzheimer’s Research UK is the UK’s leading dementia research charity and one of the UK’s fastest growing medical research charities. In the past five years the organisation had tripled in size as it has successfully harnessed public attention and support, driven political will and accelerated research. Although progress was temporarily disrupted by the pandemic, ARUK remained focused on returning to growth as quickly as possible. To help build on this momentum and drive their ambitious growth strategy, ARUK worked with AAR to find a new agency partner to help plan, shape, create and implement a more integrated approach to their brand and supporter acquisition programmes.

We worked closely with the ARUK team to design a process that would give the marketing team sufficient reassurance that they were selecting the right agency partner, whilst also being respectful to pitching agencies and their people, time, and resource. Agencies were invited to a series of chemistry meetings and strategy workshops, to best replicate what it would be like to work together. At the end of the process, ARUK appointed Above+Beyond as their lead strategic and creative agency, and they are currently working to develop and launch the new brand positioning and communications platform to go live in early 2023.

Tim Parry, Director of Communications, Brand and Digital at Alzheimer’s Research UK, commented:

"Alzheimer’s Research UK found an ideal partner in AAR to help secure the charity’s new brand strategy agency. AAR invested a huge amount of time and energy in getting to grips with our brief, and offered positive challenge to help us improve our thoughts on what sort of agency we were seeking. They supported us end to end with our selection, guiding us on commercials, presentations and pitch prep in a professional and reassuring way. As a result, we had the most difficult of decisions in selecting our final brand partner, as the calibre of agencies AAR assembled was incredibly high and we were spoiled for choice. We couldn’t recommend AAR more highly.”