client objective
Co-op wanted to encourage conversations about funeral plans, by using facts relevant to the audience to start normalising discussions about end of life plans. This would then remove the taboo and start creating a link to Co-op’s funeral offering. It was based around insight, using survey responses to identify regional trends. People might not like talking about death, but they love a fact. And the more relevant the fact is to an audience, the more likely it is to resonate and be shared.
the big idea
A nationwide survey into the UK’s funeral wishes, designed to uncover the facts around the thoughts and wishes of the country on their end of life plans. The results of the survey would enable Global and Co-Op to identify trends associated with funeral planning, filtering the results regionally to identify local trends. These trends populate high impact outdoor sites in the local towns/cities relevant to that local trend, reflecting the funeral wishes of the local area and driving relevancy. To normalise those conversations, this targeted Outdoor campaign would be supported with just that; conversations. On-air features across Global radio stations, podcast host reads, and localised DAX (syncing with outdoor) would utilise Global’s audio ability to reach audiences on a national and regional scale through encouraging audiences to think about their funeral plans.
making it happen
The unique research piece was launched to enable us to find out the funeral wishes of the nation. Open ended questions asked respondents to describe their own funeral, with Relative Insight software used to analyse not just the different answers but also the different language they used to understand the regional differences on a deeper level. This research enabled us to identify ‘end of life’ planning trends with the results filtered regionally to identify local trends (e.g.: People in Birmingham are more likely to want David Bowie played at their funeral than any other part of the country whilst Geordies are x27 times more likely to want a football themed service) enabling our fact based creative campaign to be populated and produced. Using Large Format Digital sites, artwork unique to its region delivered the funeral wishes of that region at scale. Large Format Digital reached over 1.8m adults with over 5.1m impacts delivered with a 1 in 6 SOV. Supporting these sites, smaller formats including Street Hubs and D6s on London Underground and National Rail sites delivered over 18.7m impacts in 10 key focus regions. Mirroring the regional poster copy, audio spots across the Heart, Smooth and DAX Networks further shared the nations funeral wishes, delivering regional trends on a national scale and highlighting local trends for end of life celebrations in that area. Regional dialects were used to create cut through and increase the relevance to the area in which the content was reflecting. This audio support went beyond spots though. Funeral Director James Murray talked live on-air to LBC’s James O’Brien about the importance of planning ahead for a funeral, with podcasts bringing the subject further into conversational media with Host-reads from the likes of Vogue Williams, Josh Widdicombe and Rob Beckett allowing the hosts to offer their own perspective on the topic.
results
Post campaign analysis of exposed audiences (delivering a 56% recall) showed the campaign delivered on all KPIs :45% of respondents stated they had now thought about their funeral wishes, with 24% stating they had now spoken to their family and friends about their funeral wishes and 29% stating they had visited the Co-Op funeral care website. Most importantly, 9% stated they had now taken action and took out a funeral plan with Co-Op funeral care.
Source: Differentology 2021
