Challenges and Objectives

One in two of us will face cancer in our lifetime, yet Macmillan faced a stubborn perception problem: people know the brand but don’t understand its breadth. Macmillan helps anyone affected by cancer with health, lifestyle and financial support, from the first “something’s wrong” all the way through to diagnosis, living with it, and after.

However, the public sees curing cancer as the urgent, fundable cause and sees care as secondary; outside Coffee Morning season Macmillan slips down the donation priority list. And what’s worse the people who most need Macmillan’s help are the least likely to ask. Macmillan needed to make cancer care feel both urgent and relevant - to be known well, not just known. To be more than a coffee morning.

We didn’t theorise it; we asked people. Real people, really living with cancer. And they told us plainly: “Macmillan isn’t for me - I wouldn’t go there for support.” That was the unlock. Amongst those that mattered most, people living with cancer, Macmillan didn’t register. We knew the job then; to show, in the most relatable and real way, the care and support that Macmillan gives to even the most reluctant of cancer patients. Enter Emmerdale hardman Cain Dingle.

Idea & Implementation

We would make Macmillan the real-world extension of Cain Dingle’s cancer story and show Macmillan as the people who step in when the fiction ends and real life begins.

Targeting Strategy

• This worked because of access to content no other media owner can offer: a brand brought, under NDA, inside Emmerdale’s unaired scripts.

• Just one person could read them, six weeks out, with the content still liable to change up to a fortnight before transmission.

• So the team ran a “reactive war room” of near-daily calls, staying reactive to a storyline that kept shifting.

• Macmillan was woven in contextually. Everything from hospital-scene posters to branded mugs which all culminated in a scene of ever-stoic Cain picking up and reading a Macmillan leaflet.

• Around each episode, three bespoke 30” TVCs fronted by real, unpaid Macmillan staff ran first-in-break, each adapted to that night’s story and carrying extended helpline hours.

• Social - the warmest, most intimate strand of content - put the Dingle family alongside a real cancer survivor and a Macmillan campaigner inside the Woolpack.

• Real jeopardy ran throughout: procurement scrutinised it line by line and demanded social guarantees we couldn’t give; the budget nearly collapsed; it was now-or-never, tied to a storyline that would never come again.

Client Quote

“Macmillan’s groundbreaking work with Emmerdale let us step through the fourth wall and into the moment people actually feel it - that’s something no other partner could have given us.”

KATE JOANS, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS, MACMILLAN CANCER SUPPORT