Commercial real estate firm Avison Young is a leading global voice and a trusted advisor to some of the UK’s most ambitious local authorities, investors, and developers. 

The firm’s Urban Futures campaign is an ongoing series of events and regional Outlook reports, focussed on key UK cities and their projected growth over the coming five years. The events bring together key voices and decision-makers from across the public and private sectors to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing each city – and uncover the sectors, communities and developments driving growth. 

To maximise the impact of the reports, Active Profile planned and executed a sprint of PR, content and media relations activity to drive awareness across the cities and wider regions. The first wave of reports which focused on Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Bristol and Cardiff, were created by Avison Young’s insights team, drawing on compelling data to illustrate the economic outlook. 

Our approach to PR hinged upon finding angles in the data within the reports and using it to build positive news stories that captured the key growth opportunities and developments within each city and positioned Avison Young’s regional managing directors as leading the conversation in each region. 

From Liverpool and Manchester to Cardiff and Bristol, we secured all-important media coverage across trade and regional titles, building an insightful and exciting narrative around the trends and indicators impacting the real estate market in each city. This approach resulted in an editorial reach of over 900,000 in key media, over 23,000 video views on social media, and over 100,000 impressions. 

To expand the reach of the campaign we also created video content to promote the campaign, featuring Avison Young’s regional managing directors. Each spokesperson drew on key insights from the reports themselves, expanding on the different city narratives and the optimism and opportunity in these regions in 2024.  

Alongside our core support to promote the reports and insights through generating media coverage, we subsequently secured interviews for the regional managing directors with leading national trade publications, including Estates Gazette, The Business Desk, Business Live and CoStar, offering valuable avenues for Avison Young’s spokespeople to elevate their position as the ‘People for Place’ across the UK real estate market.