Loose Women a Winner for NHS Charities Together

We’ve seen plenty of ads over the years which use a celebrity spokesperson to get a brand or charity message across. This new ad from NHS Charities Together in partnership with ITV goes a step further – instead of just using Loose Women presenters Kaye Adams and Brenda Edwards to promote or endorse the charity, it stages an entire minute-long segment of the ITV panel show using the Loose Women branding and set. Not so much a celebrity spokesperson as a celebrity spokesprogramme!

The bespoke segment involves Kaye Adams talking to Kate, an NHS nurse, in the studio while Brenda Edwards meets a wheelchair user who’s been helped by the charity to get the support he needs to get outside and rekindle his wildlife photography hobby. It explains the purpose of NHS Charities Together, which is to fund projects like this that benefit NHS staff and patients. It’s a broad remit which can seem rather vague, so focusing on one particular project like this is a great way of illustrating what the charity does.

What are the benefits of staging the ad as a Loose Women segment? It’s not an attempt to deceive viewers – there’s clear signing throughout that this is an ad you’re watching, not part of the show itself. Instead it’s a way of taking a commercial which involves a lot of information and putting it into a format most viewers already know, trust and enjoy. The nature of this ad would normally require some kind of voiceover to put across the information on NHS Charities Together and their projects. But we know from Orlando Wood’s work in Lemon and Look Out that voiceovers can have a deadening influence on emotional response to ads. Turning the ad into a TV segment, and a very familiar one, is a way of avoiding that fate and giving the audience something that’ll make them feel good.

And making the audience feel good is exactly what this ad achieves. It scores a 4.3-Star Rating on our Test Your Ad platform, a strong result for any commercial. And let’s be clear – charity ads are not always strong performers. In fact the average score for all charity ads is a poor 1.7-Stars, mostly because many charities deal with painful or harrowing subjects and want to bring home the urgency of their fundraising appeals, which means higher levels of negative emotion.

If you’re a charity that can emphasise the positive in its advertising, it pays to do so, as this NHS Charities Together spot proves. As you might expect for a sector where immediate donations are so vital, charity ads perform better on short-term Spike rating, where the average score is strong. But this ad still beats the sector average, with an Exceptional short-term Spike.

Overall then this is a very effective charity ad, and an example of how imaginative use of existing ITV branding can really enhance the appeal of a commercial. Not every brand can be turned into its own Loose Women slot, but for a charity partner, drawing on the show’s popularity has worked really well.