- Background
- Objectives
- Campaign
- Results
Regional TV advertising
Stockport Council delivers a range of key services to the 280,000 residents of the borough, which is part of Greater Manchester. In early 2008, there were around 300 children staying with foster carers in the borough, but the Council urgently needed to recruit around 20 more carers to meet demand at the time.
- To increase awareness of the need for foster carers in Stockport
- To run a TV campaign (alongside other local media) in order to reach a wide variety of people who might like to become foster carers
- To build up the Council’s bank of carers
The campaign ran for seven days in February 2008 in the ITV1 Granada region only, in order to eliminate wastage for Stockport Council. The 20-second animated commercial focused on a child’s expectations of a foster carer and displayed Stockport Council’s contact details at the end.
"We hadn’t used TV as part of our advertising campaigns before. However, a colleague in our Newcastle office used ITV1 Tyne Tees and recommended it due to the success of their campaign. We used other local media, as we wanted to create a strong message, but TV was a major component of this and the instant response to the ads far exceeded that of previous press, outdoor or radio campaigns.
"The number of enquiries in the first week alone was greater than other advertising achieved over the same period. We also arranged an interview on Granada Reports, so all in all we received some great coverage. Working with ITV was instrumental to the success of the campaign."
Cheryl Stevens, Stockport Council, Information & Publicity Officer
The commercial achieved 90.8 TVRs, an average of 6.0. Almost 2.2 million adults saw the commercial at least once and 370,000 saw it four times or more (source: BARB/Infosys).
The results were instantaneous. The enquiry rate increased by 400% after the campaign and the Council received 110 responses in the first few days – a normal response rate would have been just one or two per day.
This sort of response from a seven-day campaign can only be attributed to good coverage, of which the ITV advertisement was a major element.