Shelter targets left-leaning urban audience with cost-of-living campaign
The Media Plan
Shelter’s latest campaign has been designed to resonate with a left-leaning, progressive, politically engaged, urban audience to help gain support to end the housing emergency.
The charity has highlighted so-called hacks to deal with the cost of living crisis across outdoor, social media, as well as contextual posts on sites with Reddit and Twitter to highlight the unaffordable cost of housing putting people at risk of homelessness this winter.
The ads suggest a tongue-in-cheek alternative solution, that the Government takes responsibility for the cost of living crisis and makes housing more affordable.
The campaign, which comes ahead of Shelter’s winter appeal, will be live for five weeks after launching on 26 September across England. It includes an editorial partnership with Vice and work with Ozone to ensure the message gets in to environments where the audience reads about politics and current affairs, with contextual placements around the economy and cost of living crisis.
In addition, the campaign will use specially designed beermats in pubs up and down the country, a bespoke mural in Shoreditch, and tailored creative outside the Conservative Party Conference to encourage people to talk about housing and influence their peers.
Louise Martell, chief strategy officer of Yonder Media, said Shelter’s new brand and “Fight For Home” platform is “quite radical” and takes cues from social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion.
She explained: “We decided to focus our campaign on a left-leaning, urban audience who adopt social/political causes as part of their identity and galvanise others around them. We want to harness that energy for Shelter and ensure that our budget goes as far as possible by stimulating word of mouth and advocacy.”
Martell added the progressive audience felt like “a natural base” for the charity and the ambition is to broaden our audience focus and build national consensus on Shelter’s mission.
She said outdoor had become “a particularly important channel” for Shelter as it lent the charity “a presence” on the streets and neighbourhoods where the housing emergency manifests itself.
The national outdoor campaign will use “grittier sites” like flyposting and murals and its sitelist is additionally planned to over-index in regions with a high proportion of renters.
The objectives of the campaign were to drive “belief in cause”, buzz and conversation around Shelter and the housing emergency, as well as engagement with the campaign. Each of these will be measured respectively through CharityIndex, social listening tools and social platforms.
The strategy was based on two pieces of research; Shelter’s own study which found almost 1.1 million private renters in England, or one in seven, have had their rent increased in the last month, and feedback from Gen Z research platform, Imagen Insights, that talked to people currently living with unaffordable rents.
The creative was designed by Shelter’s in-house creative team with media strategy by Yonder Media.
The Media Plan is a regular feature, part of Strategy Leaders, our commitment to showcase the media industry’s most important strategy issues and debates, as well as focus on notable ad campaigns and from a media-planning lens.
Sign up for our daily newsletter and receive Strategy Leaders every Thursday.