LONDON — Digital therapeutics provider Big Health has appointed Sunny Side Up as its UK PR agency after a competitive pitch.

The agency’s brief covers corporate and consumer communications for the 10-year-old company, as it seeks to further educate the NHS on the benefits of providing digital cognitive behavioural therapy to treat common mental health disorders.

Big Health was founded by Professor Colin Espie, director of sleep at the University of Oxford, and British entrepreneur Peter Hames, with the aim of making cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) available to millions via a digital platform with two products: Sleepio, which helps users with poor sleep and insomnia, and Daylight, which helps users with worry and anxiety.

Sleepio is already prescribed by doctors across many parts of the UK and has been chosen by the NHS as one of four recommended programmes to support healthcare professionals with their mental health during the pandemic.

Sunny Side Up founder Nick Woods said: “Mental health is, as we all know, a big and growing issue, likely to be only exacerbated by the effects of Covid and the recession.

“Digital therapeutics are increasingly seen as brilliant ways to allow many people to help themselves in the first instance and to keep them out of the health system with this issue, hopefully forever. We’re huge fans of this kind of therapy and can’t wait to help Big Health, who have over 50 peer-reviewed papers behind them, tell their story more widely.”

Big Health UK director Charlotte Lee added: “This was a highly competitive pitch and we’re delighted with our choice. Consumer and trade PR are crucial to us and Sunny Side Up demonstrated impressive creativity, knowledge and ability to deliver, on every challenge. Healthtech is an increasingly competitive market, and we needed an agency which really understood agile marketing which, again, they did in spades.”

In May, Sunny Side up appointed former Publicasity owner and managing director Zoe Ward-Waring as its first MD. The agency’s clients span the premium food and drink, health, nutrition and technology sectors.