‘Concise’ can save lives
Not often, but sometimes, just sometimes the best ideas are the ones you arrive at almost instantly. That was the case with this campaign for Diabetes UK.
Diabetes UK is the UK’s leading diabetes charity. They help people manage diabetes and fund pioneering research into care, cure and prevention.
Type 1 is a complex condition, but complexity doesn’t make for a great campaign. That’s why the 4 Ts worked.
To mark World Diabetes Day 2012, the team wanted a public facing campaign to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of Type 1 diabetes among parents and healthcare professionals.
Early diagnosis of Type 1 is crucial. It means the condition can be managed before it gets deadly. Undetected, Type 1 can rapidly cause diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a serious and potentially fatal complication of diabetes.
Type 1 is a complex condition, but complexity doesn’t make for a great campaign. We needed to quickly and memorably communicate the key signs of Type 1 diabetes in children, namely feeling more tired and thirsty than usual, losing weight and, the most telling one, needing to wee a lot.
The campaign went on to become Diabetes UK’s (and our) most successful campaign to date. We’re proud of that. Toilet and all.
“It’s all the Ts then? Thirsty, tired, thinner… toilet?” proffered one of our creatives at the time. And that was how the 4Ts campaign was born.
Keeping it simple and relatable
As is often the way, you feel you should come up with more ideas. Something smarter, harder. Something that just wasn’t quite so easy. And we did. Yet nothing came close to the 4 Ts — it just worked.
Diabetes UK agreed and we took the 4 Ts forward into national press and TV ads. The words ‘tired, thirsty, thinner and toilet’ written in kids’ fridge magnets — a treatment our audience could easily relate to — could be found in doctors surgeries and Parent & Child magazines across the UK.
Most successful campaign to date
We found it almost bemusing that something so simple could work so well. Yet it did. Within the first few days of the campaign’s launch, the Diabetes UK website received a total of 158,617 unique visitors on the day of launch. And there were 3,940 Facebook likes for the campaign and 924 retweets on launch day alone (including one from @Gov). Plus, it attracted an extra 500 followers for the Diabetes UK Twitter account.
More importantly, the campaign actually changed the way GPs assess and diagnose Type 1. They now factor DKA into diagnosis for the first time, meaning they can diagnose Type 1 more efficiently and children can start receiving treatment sooner.
The campaign went on to become Diabetes UK’s (and our) most successful to date. We’re proud of that. Toilet and all.