Facebook had launched their UK ‘Friends’ campaign with a heavy outdoor and print media buy. The advertising promotes the notion of friendship which struck us as the absolute antitheses to a problem facing over a million people a year in the UK. Age UK has a service that provides friendship to lonely older people so we took advantage of the raised awareness of ‘friendship’ from the Facebook campaign to highlight the ‘no friends’ problem and encourage donation to support the charity’s plight.

The creative execution focuses on a charitable service that provides vulnerable people with companionship. It echoes the service that Facebook provides to its users. But there is a group of people who don’t live the way Facebook advertises. We used that to raise awareness and call for donations. For maximum impact, our Age UK campaign launched at the tail end of the FB campaign in order to be live at the same time and achieve maximum recognition. Press ads are running in an Eastern UK regional press buy and 48 sheets in outdoor Central London. The campaign is booked to run for 10 days although may be extended should response exceed KPIs.

At the time of writing, the campaign is still live but we have anecdotal feedback that donation numbers have increased as a result. We have also tracked an increase in visitor numbers to the Age UK website and social media engagement. Awareness impact will be tracked when the campaign is over. From an ROI perspective, the PR that has been generated alone has way exceeded the cost of the spend for the campaign.