A hundred-year-old novel about a man dismantling his own life shouldn't feel like homework. It should feel like something happening two streets away.

The Royal Danish Theatre was staging Tom Kristensen's Hærværk for the first time, and the risk with a canonical text is reverence: The audience arrives respectful and leaves unchanged. So instead of treating theatre as somewhere you come to, we pushed the story out into the city.

Vandalism became the visual language – on outdoor, and on the playhouse's own facade.

The pitch went further. Guerrilla activity around the building. And the Hærværk set – one absinthe, one ticket – in bars along the route the main character walks.

Neither made it to production. Both won us the client.

A story from the past, made urgent in the present.

Denmark is voted one of the happiest countries in the world with some regularity. Nobody has ever called it lucky.

Summer is the slow season for play, so rather than discount our way through it, we set out to bring luck back to the country. A national print and digital campaign let people track where luck was living each day – by name, by age, by time, by location – so luck stopped being an abstraction and became someone specific, somewhere specific. Daily, weekly and surprise offers gave everyone a reason to check again tomorrow.

Luck won't come looking for you.

Every brand in the category says the same thing, in the same place, at the same volume: Bonus, free spins, welcome offer. A whole industry had talked itself into noise.

So we went after the one thing an offer can't describe – the feeling. Does excitement actually make you perform better? The Duel was a three-part filmed experiment to find out: Identical twins to control for everything except adrenaline, expert commentary to keep it honest, and Facebook voting so the audience had something at stake too.

Branded entertainment instead of another discount. Engagement rose 156%.