Minimum Unit Pricing for Alcohol campaign

Between September 2019 – April 2020, Freshwater devised and implemented a communications and engagement strategy to promote the introduction of the Minimum Unit Pricing for Alcohol in Wales.

Freshwater’s brief was two-fold. One strand was to create a bilingual campaign that would inform the ‘off trade’ (eg retailers, off licenses, convenience stores and supermarkets) and the ‘on trade’ (eg pubs and bars) of the implementation date and what the law meant for them. The other was to increase public awareness and understanding of the law and the potential health benefits, including how the law aims to reduce hazardous and harmful drinking and the associated harms caused by the excessive consumption of alcohol.

Campaign planning began in September 2019. A campaign identity already existed from early activity, so we evolved this for the campaign. We introduced a key theme of ‘Price Matters’, which ran through all creatives for both the trade and the public audiences. The call-to-action for both audiences was the campaign pages on the gov.wales website, but we created a vanity URL – gov.wales/pricematters – to help monitor traffic for evaluation purposes. We used the hashtags #pricematters and #maesprisobwys on all creatives to monitor social engagement.

Welsh and English collateral was developed, bilingually where possible. In addition to digital assets and magazine inserts, we also created an animation that explained the rationale behind the legislation and how it would affect both the trade and public. This was shared on social media channels.

To develop the channel strategy, we used the PESO (paid, earned, shared and owned) model to determine the most effective channels to reach both audience groups. The trade activity began in January, with the public-facing campaign starting the week before the Act was introduced on 2 March.

Activity for the trade audience included:

• A double-sided, A5 flyer sent as an insert to 2,400 Welsh-based recipients of Convenience Store magazine.
• A bilingual emailer sent to 699 subscribers of Pub and Bar magazine.
• A series of ‘sponsored content’ adverts were promoted on LinkedIn, targeted at users with senior job titles working in the ‘food and beverage’ or ‘wine and spirits’ industries.
• A variety of display adverts on The Drinks Business website (the global leading drinks trade publication).

Activity for the public included:

• A six-week radio advertising campaign on key stations in Wales, focusing on the time period between 3pm and 8pm when people were more likely to be thinking about buying alcohol.
• A month-long trolley advertising campaign in Asda and Tesco stores across Wales.
• A comprehensive digital and social media advertising campaign including TrueView, Facebook, Twitter, Golwg 360 and WalesOnline.
• A thought-leadership piece penned from Health Minister Vaughan Gething.
• A series of visual content, including static infographics and animated videos, were promoted organically on social media.

Across both audiences, there were more than four million impressions delivered across all channels. In addition, with the trolley advertising, the total footfall for the 17 stores was more than five million during the month-long campaign. There were 39,096 views of the campaign videos on TrueView and more than 18,000 link clicks on Facebook adverts. Engagement was positive with 329 shares and 1,409 reactions on Facebook adverts and 62 retweets and 281 likes on Twitter adverts. There were 22,125 unique page views on the website during the campaign period with paid advertising channels all featuring in the top 10 referrers of traffic to the website.