TV shows Celebrity Call Centre and Coronation Street are both household names in the UK aired on Channel4 and ITV respectively. Celebrity Call Centre runs telephone lines for the festive season, in partnership with Age UK, with stars tackling various dilemmas, from dementia to grief, caring responsibilities and loss. ‘Celebrity Call Centre’ aired at 10pm on the 19th December on Channel 4, reaching 1.7m people.

* Age UK post campaign omnibus survey

We collaborated with C4 show Celebrity Call Centre, creating a special in which four celebrities took calls similar to those Age UK receive every day. Within the shows ad breaks we ran 30” adverts featuring the celebrities viewers had just seen highlighting how loneliness could be supported by Age UK’s Advice Line.

ITV’s ‘Coronation Street’ indexes extremely well for our audience (i146), so we wanted to use the nation’s most loved soap to amplify our campaign. Working with ITN we re-recorded snippets from genuine Age UK calls and then took over ‘Coronation Street’ for a week, by placing our 10” snippets in every ad break. The spots were meticulously placed so they linked to the final scene before the ad break to drive further impact.

In 2018 our task was to highlight the Age UK Advice Line service and explain how it works to people.

This was a new message from the charity and a 30” or 60” ad wouldn't give us enough time to engage our audience to make them understand what this service offers.

We knew from previous years that TV’s power to drive fame and leverage storytelling could make people act. Documentaries had been Age UK’s most powerful medium to date, with 2017’s ‘Old People’s Home for Four Year Olds’ Christmas special driving Age UK’s most successful day of donations and huge social conversation. Interest and trust in documentaries had also been growing rapidly. In 2001 Channel 4 aired four documentaries but by 2018 this had grown to 100. Confident that the impact of TV and the credibility of documentaries would drive conversation and subsequent donations, we committed 92% of our budget to TV, activating it through both editorial and advertising content integration dial up understanding and emotion.

The 2018 campaign delivered the highest day of donations for Age UK all year as well as a record number of volunteers.

71% of our target audience have a better understanding of the charity’s work and 72% have a better understanding of the complexities of loneliness*

In addition, 2018 drove a 501% increase in social conversation at 98% positive sentiment. YouGov data also shows that awareness for Age UK has reached an all- time high.

Beyond the measurable impact on the charity, it is impossible to put a price on the immeasurably positive impact on the lives of lonely older people across the country.

Through a long-term focus on cultural partnerships, we’ve managed to help stem loneliness and continue to strive to do so, because no one should have no-one, especially at Christmas.