NHS London and the pan-London Cancer Alliances
Four barriers, five nudges.
Cervical Cancer Prevention Week 2025. We treated a screening campaign as a behaviour change problem, and moved the women other campaigns miss.
14.7%
Year-on-year lift in cervical screening search, causally isolated
6.7M
Paid impressions across nine channels, 124% above target
3.93%
Meta click-through rate, roughly double the platform benchmark
The Challenge
The women least likely to attend a screening appointment are the women most likely to need one. The reasons are not logistical. They are psychological.
Uptake across London lags hardest in low-IMD postcodes and in ethnic minority communities. A woman who knows exactly what a smear test is and why it matters can still not book one, because of stigma, embarrassment, anxiety or fear of what might be found.
The KPIs were specific and unforgiving. A 10% uplift in screening search during campaign week. At least 3 million qualified impressions at 1.5% CTR or better. At least 30,000 micro-site sessions with 60 seconds or more dwell. And half of all clicks from the 25 to 34 and 35 to 44 bands.
Funding was pooled across NHS London and the Cancer Alliances, so every pound carried accountability to several commissioners at once. Five per cent was reserved from the outset for carbon offsetting and evaluation.
You cannot solve embarrassment with a leaflet.
You solve it with repetition.
Barriers like these do not fall to one powerful message. They fall to normalisation, which is a function of frequency and of who is doing the talking. So we bought frequency deliberately rather than chasing maximum unique reach: the same message three to five times across a woman's daily media rhythm. Morning scroll, commute, podcast, gym, evening feed.
Frequency needs a messenger worth hearing repeatedly. Dr Nighat Arif brought clinical authority and standing in the communities where uptake lags hardest. Laura Adlington brought warmth and an audience nobody talks to about screening at all. Together they made it a conversation among people you know, not one conducted at you by a health authority.
What We Did
Execution ran on a four-part framework. Watch, Listen, See, Discuss.
Watch. Vertical video on TikTok, Snapchat and Meta Reels carried Dr Arif and Laura Adlington debunking the misconceptions directly, reframing screening as routine self-care. YouTube In-Feed retargeted anyone who had shown interest.
Listen. Bespoke 30-second spots voiced by Dr Arif on Spotify, DAX and Acast. Audio earned its place for a reason specific to this subject: no screen anyone else can see. Every spot closed on a single-tap link.
See. Adshel Live panels and 48-sheets in boroughs including Brent, Ealing and Hounslow delivered 1.02 million impacts. Gym Group screens added 941,766 impressions, reaching women already thinking about their own health.
Discuss. A micro-site co-built with The Eve Appeal: myth-busting video, translated FAQs and a shareable social toolkit, to WCAG 2.1 AA. An accessibility failure here would have excluded precisely the groups the campaign existed to reach.
Underneath it all, a dynamic budget allocation algorithm reoptimised spend daily, moving money toward the strongest creative and platform combinations while the week was still running.
The Results
Every numerical objective met or exceeded, on measures that were causal rather than correlational.
Outputs. 6.7 million paid impressions across nine channels, 124% above target. Meta alone delivered 1.98 million impressions and 78,000 clicks at a 3.93% CTR. TikTok and Snapchat added 871,000 impressions at CPCs under £0.35.
Audio. Completion exceeded 97%. For a 30-second spot on a subject people actively avoid, that is the single most surprising number in the campaign.
Engagement. The micro-site logged 42,335 sessions against a 30,000 target, 95% of them engaged beyond 60 seconds, at an average dwell of 3 minutes 17 seconds. Women were not glancing. They were reading the thing through.
Behaviour. Google Trends data run through a Rubin causal inference model, isolating campaign geography and dates, showed a 14.7% lift in cervical screening search against the same period in 2024. The target was 10%.
Equity. Female clicks accounted for 64% of the total, with the strongest response from 25 to 34 year olds at a 4.85% CTR. Delivery landed against the priority cohorts rather than the easiest ones.
Sustainability. Total media carbon footprint of 0.287 tonnes CO2e, fully offset through Verified Carbon Standard projects.