While Brand Marketing Creative Lead at Parkinson’s UK

When I joined Parkinson’s UK, a new Brand awareness TV campaign was in production. The strategy was ‘TIME FOR CAN’ which was talked about as a new brand strategy, but no plan was in place. A TV ad alone does not make a brand strategy. it was to reverse the perception that there are lots of things people with Parkinson’s can’t do (can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t work etc). It used a simple problem/solution format and was powerful, but stark. It had shock factor, it definitely had cut through and was a clever use of existing footage. But there was no integrated campaign to halo it and the Christmas DM appeal had no plan to join up, which seemed a wasted opportunity. There were also no plans to make it BIGGER. It didn’t even feature on the website or in content and was separate to policy and campaigns work.

Challenge:

My insight was that if we wanted this new brand positioning it needed to be understood properly, it needed more depth, more lived experience which an integrated campaign can deliver. And it needed to be in everything the brand said.

Solution:

: I developed a fully integrated campaign around the ad and pre-launched it to the community. The integrated campaign centred on the stories of people featured in the ad which we published over social channels. These were 7 separate filmed interviews that I conducted. I also delivered the digital takeover of the website (home page, landing page etc) supported with content, email and PR explaining why the ad had to be so hard hitting.

The integrated campaign turned a CAN’T (Can’t sleep, can’t eat…) into a CAN more explicitly. This was delivered and managed entirely in-house by my team. This made the basis of a rich paid and organic social media campaign and we delivered all this in time for the Christmas launch.

We also filmed another 2 interviews, one with a researcher and one with a research participant (CAN HELP) to support the Christmas fundraising appeal bringing the concept into the direct mail.

I then reached out to the policy and campaigns team and used the concept to highlight work in access to care (‘CAN’T WAIT’) and with access to medication (CAN’T DO WITHOUT DRUGS’) and to highlight mental health issues (‘CAN’T GIVE IN’)

Results:

It was the most comprehensive integrated campaign the charity had ever run, integrating with the Q4 DM campaign and delivering positive impact on key campaign metrics, significantly shifting brand awareness and condition understanding ahead of targets. The campaign exceeded all expectations. The volume of donations to the appeal was higher than ever over the Christmas period; the online conversion rate almost doubled.

Viewers shared the content organically over ten times more than Parkinson’s UK’s usual content. The brand metric results from the television channels showed the creative over performed all the charity norms for brand statements.

A second outing…

I tweaked the script and we filmed (my team) new sections to deliver the 30 second TVC and 4x new 10 second executions which were used tactically on TV and on digital billboards and across paid digital to extend the budget reach. Digital posters appeared across the UK and including transvision in all major train stations across the nation. This was space donated to the charity by a media company (Smart Outdoors) inspired by our work and with proximity to cause.

The campaign ran over outdoor, using digital poster sites across the UK. I developed digital boards using shorter cutdowns including transvision in all major train stations across the nation.