Every week in the UK, 12 people under the age of 35 die of a sudden cardiac arrest, often caused by inherited heart muscle diseases (genetic cardiomyopathies).

But few people are aware of the issue and even fewer people are aware of the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) role in funding lifesaving research in this area.

As part of the announcement of the BHF’s largest ever research grant - £30m to CureHeart, a global collective of scientists from the UK, US and Singapore who are pioneering revolutionary and ultra-precise gene therapy technologies that could silence or edit the faulty genes that cause inherited heart muscle diseases, we wanted to change that.

Our strategy was grounded in the unexpected nature of heart disease.

Cardiac arrest can happen at any time. Radio is a constant media companion where silence is a rarity.

Our media strategy focussed on pulling listeners out of their expected radio experience by using media to do something that heart disease unfortunately does every day.

Stop people in their tracks.

On Monday 1st August, the British Heart Foundation stopped the ads of seven well known UK brands unexpectedly throughout the day, with the sound of a beeping heart monitor that eventually flatlines – the shocking but familiar long tone a monitor makes when alerting medical staff to someone’s heartbeat stopping.

The heart monitor sound interrupted ads from well-known brands including Sainsbury’s, On the Beach, heycar, Admiral Insurance, Dunelm, Cazoo, and Checkatrade, followed by a British Heart Foundation message detailing the impact of genetic cardiomyopathy and how the charity is funding research that aims to find a game-changing cure to stop the diseases from stopping hearts.

In just one day, we created 198 Heart-stopping moments, with the campaign being heard by 3.5m listeners.

Across the following two weeks, the BHF’s homepage traffic increased by 8.2%.

In pre vs post campaign research we’ve also seen significant increases in understanding of the work the BHF does:

• ‘The BHF invests heavily in lifesaving heart research’ +8.5%

• ‘I understand the work the BHF does’ +22%

• ‘the BHF has made major breakthroughs in understanding and treating circulatory diseases’ +10.6%

We also saw a 22% increase in consideration to donate to the BHF amongst those who heard the ads.

And even though our ads didn’t have any fundraising call to action, the CureHeart campaign delivered a donations ROI of £1:77 for every £ the BHF spent