About Aurora
We bring wildly creative thinking for big brands that catapults them into growth.
#Stargazing for brands
We help the CMOs and CEOs of global challenger brands to disrupt. Aurora’s sweet spot is engaging and galvanising communities around brands, creating genuine connection. We consult at board and C-suite offering a strategic lens who deliver disruptive ideas that tackle your biggest challenges.
Finding your brand’s Mojo through the lens of culture & zeitgeist.
We create brands from the inside out, engaging your people first, because authentic organisations are built on genuine and embedded cultural foundations.
From this solid base, we create powerful, integrated creative ideas that cut through and grow community connection.
Our thinking is driven by decades of experience at the forefront of marketing, and our extensive network, to grab all opportunities to elevate your communications for maximum reach and effect.
We fully immerse in the organisation, your challenges, your objectives and your target audiences - drawing on our extensive resources & network.
The Glow Up
Making your brand cool again or giving it fresh life. This is our way to inject strategic power into brands who may have lost their mojo, through:
Brand strategy & brand DNA
Creative strategy
Huge, global viral marketing campaigns - film, social media, UGC
Inside out brand building - from internal advocacy and pride which fuels external brand power
Finding your purpose, bringing it to life; leading with speed with develop an insightful, informed and engaged visioning strategy for how your brand can project into new horizons; resulting in the creation of an explosively differentiated and powerful positioning and activation approach - which celebrates your uniqueness and captivates audiences, old and new. Developed from the inside out, we capture your authentic brand culture & ethos into your truly authentic values, narrative, tone of voice & look & feel. Then deploy a power relaunch to win hearts & minds - a foundation for your brand’s new era.
Our unique strategic products
Culture Shot
Your brand mapped against the popular culture landscape to identify where you fit and how you can harness culture to create an ownable, relevant and impactful space.
Beginning with a deep dive into your brand culture internally & externally we map your brand against popular culture, target audiences, other brands and peers. We plot your cultural reference points to find where do you best fit, identifying the space your brand can own in the popular psyche, to build community & love around your brand whilst retaining commercial momentum. From this we create a strategic roadmap & creative ideas for genuine, powerful culturally-embedded communications to resonate with existing & new audiences.
Wow Campaigns
BIG impact, multi-channel activations which grab global attention leaving the competition behind.
Bedded in emotional storytelling and mobilised through cleverly planned & orchestrated amplification combining media, experience & the power of organic to create a huge launch moment. We draw on everything in our arsenal to create an epic moment for your bran. Leveraging people power we galvanise your community as advocates and then take the message to wider audiences to drive authentic User Generated Content. It’s a wow moment that becomes the foundation for an evergreen approach for longer term community and brand love.
People Power
Particularly strong for social good, this approach uses the power of people coming together; creating community, belonging & galvanizing audiences behind purposeful brands and causes.
There is nothing more powerful than when people come together behind a cause. We have seen this first hand with our purposeful campaigns, and the work we do with brands built out of their owned culture when fully embedded and lived by their own teams. In the age of greenwashing brands are understandably tentative to put their head above the parapet. We help you do this in an authentic way to build a strong community of advocacy.Harnessing your people combined with the right influencers, collaborators, advocates and with organic, authentic energy and the viral peer-to-peer power of User Generated Content to spread awareness.
Global to local…
We are expert at taking campaigns internally, adapting big brand messaging to fit culturally and resonate with local audiences.
Super collaborative, we work with you to forge craft powerful, strategically led ideas and activations - and the detailed plans - that help clients blow their objectives out of the water.
Who you’ll work with
Work directly with two of the UK’s leading marketing, brand and creative strategists, with decades of experience spanning the full spectrum of the advertising World - supported by our expert in-house production team & network of specialists.
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Co-Founder, CEODawn has enjoyed an award winning and successful 25 year career in leadership roles across the creative industries, entertainment, retail and technology sectors.
She is the Co-Founder and CEO of global creative experience company Aurora – an agency which catapults brands to growth through culture, connection and society level thinking.
She was Vice President Marketing at Universal Pictures and prior this, UK Marketing Director at Nintendo UK.
Over a 10 year period, she oversaw the transformation of the video game and entertainment landscape in the UK, directly overseeing the record breaking launch of the Wii, Nintendo DS, Brain Training and Wii Fit in what was the most successful period of Nintendo’s 110 year history. Dawn was also the only female on the global leadership team.
She has masterminded over 50 high profile film and TV entertainment launches including Despicable Me 2, Les Miserables and Downton Abbey.
She is a long-standing member of gender equality campaigning organisation WACL and has chaired their national mentoring and events programme for next generation talent – Talent Sessions. She has also consulted and sat on the boards of some of the UK’s most dynamic creative and digital start-ups.
A Scouser born and bred, Dawn lives in Liverpool with her husband, son Milo and Snips the Beagle.
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Co-Founder, Chief Creative & Strategy Office
A veteran of the digital and advertising industry, Valerie delivers macro perspective thinking and creativity, imagining breakthrough ideas that transcend the everyday.
Valerie started working in digital in the year Google launched and has been leading creative and digital strategy for global brands over the past 25 years. Following completing a pioneering MA in Digital at City University London, Valerie learnt her craft in UX and copywriting roles at Ogilvy and WPP agencies.
She won awards early on for her groundbreaking digital strategic work for MSN, AMEX, Nestle, Royal Mail, Deloitte and Ford.
Valerie delivered the first ASOS brand and website, and worked with The Who's Pete Townshend on his future-focussed idea to harness digital to elevate new artists. She developed the first website for cult TV series, Red Dwarf, including 3D modelling their much loved Starbug spacecraft.
Valerie has since led brand, creative and digital strategy at renowned agencies leading transformation projects for global clients such as Universal Music, The British Council, MCFC, Canary Wharf Group, Primark and The Liverpool Philharmonic -amongst many other brands.
Her work has spanned private and public sector clients, as well as working in-house as Head of EMEA User Experience at Bank Of America.
Mid-lockdown in 2021 Valerie co-founded Aurora with Dawn Paine, their ambition to build a global strategic creative experience company who harness culture & community to craft huge ideas that shape and change the World.
This kind of thinking is demonstrated by their self-initiated multi-award winning global movement #HelpUkraineSong, which used Eurovision 2023 to build a platform of unity with Ukraine through music & the arts - achieving an incredible international reach of over 450 million.
A huge music enthusiast, with a past performing in bands, choirs and working as a music journalist, Valerie has a great passion for all things entertainment and culture.
Proudly female founded, we are deeply passionate about gender equality. We work closely with our clients and community on EDI - delivering strategy, events, mentoring - and we support women on their career pathways in the advertising industry.
