The Veeva code is GB-38758

Flu can be seriously debilitating not just for children but for local health services. Vaccinating them is proven to reduce hospital admissions by 85%. The effect even spreads to the adults around them, reducing their doctor visits by 63%.

Our brief was to target hard to reach parents and persuade them to get their child vaccinated against flu - despite a lack of urgency and hardening attitudes towards vaccination.

The results of our campaign were striking. Proving that some things just have to be seen (or heard) to be believed.

Half the UK engaged with the campaign

33,300,150 impressions

2,074, 792 interactions

+53% forecast expectations

3,064,876 vaccines given

79,687 extra kids vaccinated

The "Abyss" audio experience dramatizes one of the more common reasons kids get yelled at: putting their fingers in their mouths.

The narrator describes this damp, hot orifice with the colour and vigor David Attenborough might use to paint a picture in your mind, piece by piece. Forcing the listener to hold on for the big reveal: "Rummaging around their mouth for a stuck bit of chicken is just one way kids spread flu."

Our radio campaign as a whole lets radio do what it does best... paint powerful pictures in people’s minds. Collectively, it allows listeners to experience (up close and personal) the most disgusting, repugnant and tangible pictures of nasty, yet common ways flu spreads. The evocative writing was designed to bring to life the dank and damp germ-ridden places that kids have no qualms about visiting. And to do it where it matters most, in the mind.

This radio ad dramatizes a child trying to get a bit of food out of their mouth, complete with visceral (almost ASMR) gooey, slimy, sloppy sound effects.

VO: It’s damp in here - hot and humid and stale. He’s flying blind. Something drips on him, prompting him to hurry, desperate to locate what he’s looking for. He touches something squelchy and recoils. The smell putrid but he pushes on through the muck and the sludge. Squelching and sucking every step. The sounds echoing in the muculent abyss. He’s near, he can tell even though the air is thick and glutinous, moisture hanging all around. He finds it jammed in between two rocks. He takes a breath and gingerly ventures further into the gap, digging at it, prising it from the gelatinous murk. Along with that unmistakable rotting stench.

VO: Rummaging around their mouth for a stuck bit of chicken is just one way flu spreads among kids.

Look out for the flu vaccine letter from school.

Catch the vaccine, not the flu.

"A Touch of Flu: Theater of the Mind" is a radio campaign for a large, well-established pharmaceutical company. The goal of this work was to successfully increase flu vaccination in the UK (ultimately leading to uptake of a branded vaccine).

MHRA regulations, UK

All parents of vaccine age children in the UK (where flu vaccines are free for all school age children).