Promoting EU Settled Status Applications in Wales

Freshwater was commissioned by Welsh Government to deliver a campaign to drive applications for settled status for EU citizens living in Wales before the deadline.

Freshwater was tasked with delivering an awareness-raising campaign that stimulated action among EU citizens living in Wales, driving their applications for ‘settled status’ in order for them to remain living in the UK beyond the EU exit.

Our campaign needed to be distinctive in terms of raising awareness of the need and urgency to apply for settled status, cutting through all the ‘noise’ surrounding Brexit. As this campaign had a set deadline that EU citizens had to apply by, we needed to make sure that the message was clear – Wales wants you to remain and will do all it can to help you to stay; you’re both welcomed and valued here.

We created a striking graphic which was used in visual advertising over a wide range of digital channels, using the design of the ‘Welcome to Wales’ sign. The copy played on the present and past tense of the word ‘love’ and was translated into 24 languages and promoted across digital channels – including social, search and display – to reach EU citizens throughout Wales.

The campaign reached a huge audience on Facebook with over one million impressions delivered. Our Facebook performance significantly outperformed expected benchmarks at a user level. The sentiment towards our ads were extremely positive across all languages, with over 94.36% of the reactions being viewed as positive. The Google Display ads also outperformed all industry benchmarks.

Furthermore, the campaign performed roughly in-line with other advertisers in the same placements, which indicates that we were successful in reaching our target audience through the most effective manner. We also reached over 1.8 million people with our display activity which, thanks to our targeted approach through language and topic targeting, helped us maximise campaign awareness with our target audience.