For millions of older people, the festive period can magnify any feelings of how alone they are, as the acute absence of friends and family is felt, and routine services tend to wind down and shops close or shut earlier.

UK charity Age UK needed to show the country the scale of older isolation at Christmas, which is that for 1.6million older people, Christmas Day is the hardest day of the year.

Given the vast budgets of Christmas advertisers and the demands on people’s attention, our challenge was to drive disproportionate impact, fame and talkability for Age UK (with a tiny 6% charity sector SOV). We had to show that Age UK was there for lonely older people, and we had to turn the campaign around within five weeks.

Reality TV has never been more popular in the UK, with two of 2023’s three most watched shows being reality series.

In 2023, the OG of reality TV was relaunched by ITV. Big Brother is a live format where 10 strangers become housemates, watched 24/7 by ‘Big Brother’.

Hidden cameras capture everything meaning the housemates are never alone, in contrast to the 1.6million older people who live in daily isolation.

Our idea was to play on this uncomfortable reality and use this famously lively TV house to show the reality experienced by millions of lonely older people: silence, emptiness, and isolation.

We would strip the Big Brother house of its life and place a single, older person in there as the only housemate, showing that the house is an isolating place when everyone has gone.

And to maximise the impact, we needed to make it feel live.

We convinced Big Brother to give us access to the set for the first time ever.

But with 70% less budget YOY, we could only afford one moment to reach as many people as possible, so with TV as our cultural anchor, it also became our distribution channel.

On December 23rd, we found our moment. As families settled into Christmas, they tuned into the UK’s biggest shared viewing family show of the weekend: ITV's The Voice.

This shared family viewing moment was key to juxtapose the togetherness viewers at home were having, compared to the reality of an isolated older person.

We planned four ads across the show, featuring a live timestamp of TX, to echo the format of Big Brother, but also jolt viewers into the reality that millions of older people would be alone in the very same moment they were together with their loved ones.

With seven days to go before the Big Brother final, we were naïve in thinking that we could shoot after the show ended. But the house was due to be disassembled within hours of the final, so we had no choice but to shoot with the series still live, the house full of housemates, and multiple cameras catching every movement.

Depicting isolation was going to be a challenge.

Our only choice was to shoot whilst the housemates slept, on a closed set, with just the actor on his own. And we only had 60 minutes to do it.

In possibly the fastest advertising shoot ever, we captured multiple scenes, editing 60 minutes down into four 30 second spots. These were silent, except for the voice of Big Brother, Marcus Bentley, whose recognisable voice opened the ads alongside the iconic Paul Oakenfold theme tune, mimicking the start of an episode.

We needed to drive awareness, fame and talkability for Age UK around the issue of isolation.

Within one hour, we smashed all our targets.

• The ads reached 2.5M viewers of the Voice on 23rd December

• A further half a million people viewed the ads on Instagram

• The ads accounted for 85% of Age UK’s views on X in December

• They became Age UK’s most watched content ever on TikTok

• Social mentioned soared by 849%

• Donations driven via TV increased 64%

• Overall donations increased 123%

The work also tackled loneliness directly with older people, encouraging an additional 30% to talk about the issue and understanding Age UK was the charity too support them.

By hacking a reality format, we brought awareness to the uncomfortable reality of widespread loneliness and helped make the hardest day of the year a little easier for many older people.