Levels. Tiers. Lockdowns. Support bubbles. Christmas bubbles. Stay Alert. Hands Face Space. Download an app. Eat Out to Help Out.

Purely from a communications perspective, wow.

Almost a year of just throwing different messages at what must now be a bewildered and weary nation. https://twitter.com/HuffPostUK/status/1346154354634588166

I think people underestimate how hard it is to get any kind of message through to a significant number of people. Forget getting people to comply. Just to get your message to be heard and understood at scale is very, very difficult and requires experience and skill.

This was one of the reasons why I was always sceptical about the Government's chances of getting "tens of millions" of people to download and use the app.

Thread from last year https://twitter.com/LewisWiltshire/status/1251457313640194054?s=19

If they'd just prioritised that as the sole marketing message, it still would have been next to impossible to hit those kind of numbers. As it is, with the app just one of a series of bamboozling messages the public has been hit with, "next to impossible" becomes, well, you know.

Like every other reasonable and law-abiding person, I have been frustrated by the number of people who clearly have not been adhering to the guidelines. Some probably wilfully understood them and disregarded them. But how many people simply just couldn't keep up with it all?

How many people claim someone is "in my bubble" in order to go see them, when they know the bubbles aren't a thing now, versus those who genuinely thought they still were?

In marketing and communications terms you would need to repeat very clear, understandable guidance, very often, for it to permeate. If it changes so often that even law-abiding folk struggle to keep up with what they're meant to be doing, that is going to be very hard indeed.