John Lewis is the UK’s most successful Christmas advertiser. The nation awaits its Christmas ad with huge anticipation each year and engagement and shares are in their millions. This partnership was a first for them and a coup for Age UK.

*Binet & Fields 2017

Gogglebox aired in C4 primetime and reached 4.6m adults.

Good Morning Britain aired on ITV day time and reached 551,000 adults.

Celebrity Call Centre aired in C4 primetime and reached 885,000 adults.

Coronation Street aired on ITV primetime and reached 7.2m adults.

Old People’s Home for Four Year Olds aired in C4 primetime and reached 2.43m adults.

We started by making people aware. We needed an ally to infiltrate public consciousness, so we partnered with retailer John Lewis and piggy-backed its huge Man on The Moon Christmas campaign.

Then, we needed volunteers for our Call in Time Service, so we showed the reality of loneliness, creating a tool to specifically target locations suffering from acute loneliness to drive action.

Then, we shared stories from real residents through a Christmas special of Channel 4’s” Old People’s Home for Four Year Olds”. 2.43 million viewers watched and donations rocketed.

finally, the advice line was showcased through an Age UK special of Channel 4’s ‘Celebrity Call Centre’, we ran 30”ads featuring real calls that highlighted the reality of elderly loneliness. Through an editorial partnership with the UKs most popular soap opera** we pulled storylines into ad breaks with 10” call snippets that echoed the last scene of the show.

We needed to make loneliness part of the cultural consciousness, at a time when consideration was low.

Campaigns that drive brand fame and emotion outperform on all long-term business metrics*. So, driving disproportionate fame, quickly, became our focus.

Our strategy of creating disruption through cultural and scalable partnerships allowed our small budgets to overperform.

2015: With a SOV of 3%, traditional planning was impossible, so we partnered with the biggest UK Christmas advertiser, forcing the nation to reflect on our uncomfortable topic, juxtaposing togetherness at Christmas.

2016: Our approach came from Joseph Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”. This insight allowed us to put real faces against a numbing statistic. TV told the emotive story of one person and made Age UK impossible to ignore.

2017: To convey the severity of loneliness and the role of Age UK, traditional advertising slots were too short. So documentaries became our lead media, due to their perception of being authentic, trustworthy and rapid growth in popularity.

2018: The culmination of years of learning what drove cultural moments, conversation and action, combining both editorial and advertising content doubled impact and gave us our best fundraising period ever.

In year one we delivered an incremental £2.5m for Age UK.

Year two resulted in 33,000 volunteers for Call in Time in four weeks and a 245% increase in calls from lonely older people wanting to receive calls.

Cash donations increased by 4%, the largest increase in Age UK’s history.

Year three saw Age UK’s biggest ever day of fundraising with OPHFFYO*** trending at number one on Twitter.

Volunteers increased by 82%, regular donations by 53% and one-off donations by 32%.

Last year, we helped the public understand the role of Age UK and drove a 501% increase in social conversation.

Over four years, our strategy has grown Age UK from a small charity to one of the best-supported in the country and helped it to end loneliness for countless older people.

According to YouGov Awareness for the charity has reached an all-time high.