Age UK ‘Just another day’ / Drum

Age UK’s latest spot highlights the loneliness that the elderly experience not just at Christmas time but throughout the year.

The charity found that, in England, over 1.2 million older people are chronically lonely and 1.4 million say that Christmas passes them by as just another day. To raise awareness of the struggle faced by these people particularly at Christmas time, the charity has released a 60-second spot which documents an elderly man’s routine which goes unchanged throughout the seasons in a year.

The same shots depicting the man’s daily life are repeated over and over. The mise-en-scène changes to demonstrate the time of the year, yet the lack of human interaction the man receives remains the same. With the man’s only contact with other people happening during his daily trip to the local supermarket, a sad moment occurs when winter comes around and the man heads to his supermarket to find it closed due to the snow or holidays. Returning home, the man looks on bittersweetly as, from a far, he witnesses his neighbour’s family full of energy, chatter and laughter before returning to his own empty home. The ad, created by agency Drum, runs under the strapline ‘no one should have no one’.

The spot will be supported by a partnership with Channel 4, brokered by Manning Gottlieb OMD, which will bring a festive special of Old People’s Home for 4-Year-Olds, which shows what happens when a nursery group share their classroom with a group of pensioners for six weeks. Age UK sponsorship idents will run throughout the show. The programme is designed as a social experiment to highlight the improvements in the health and happiness of the elderly through regular human contact. The work will also be supported by out-of-home activity which will spread messages about loneliness in the elderly.

The timing of the ad is poignant and will be effective in helping people stop and think of those in a less fortunate situation to themselves this Christmas. The partnership with Channel Four’s popular ‘4-year-olds’ series also works perfectly and will help support the campaign by providing a true to life reflection of the loneliness of the elderly partnered with the happiness brought to them through human interaction. This campaign will give people food for thought this festive season and, if it doesn’t increase donations to the charity, it will be sure to encourage people to reach out to those family, friends, neighbours or strangers that could be facing a lonely Christmas.