When you share food you share friendship. And for lonely people, friendship can be a life-saving asset. Three years ago, McCann London and British food company, Bisto, found out that for 1 in 7 people, Sunday is the loneliest day of the week.
So the partners launched the Bisto Together Project to bring people together whatever the barriers. And part of this was Spare Chair Sunday, a project that asked families to invite an elderly person to Sunday lunch.
Spare Chair Sunday has been extremely successful. This year, McCann and Bisto are bringing back it back, with renewed relevance.
In order to get new people to sign up, McCann London teamed up with well-known illustrator and artist, Mr Doodle, to create a set of four beautiful, bespoke chairs featuring designs that reflect the lives of four elderly people.
These chairs are anything but ordinary. They can only be bought with kindness. Brits are given the chance to get one when they sign up to Spare Chair Sunday and host a Spare Chair Sunday lunch.
This year Bisto also has the backing of Helen George, best known for her role as Trixie Franklin on the BBC TV drama series Call the Midwife, to help encourage even more volunteers to invite an older person into their home.
The PR campaign, with supporting TV and radio ads, will run for six weeks from November 15 until the end of December. The work involves a partnership with Global Radio as well as charity, Contact the Elderly, which organises volunteer-led monthly Sunday gatherings for older people across England, Scotland and Wales who live alone.
Helen Warren Piper, marketing director at Premier Foods, commented, “We have a 100-year heritage of bringing people together around the dinner table, for home cooked meals. We were able to help a huge number of people through our Spare Chair Sunday project when it first launched in 2015. And we are really pleased to be able to play our part once again in tackling loneliness amongst older people in the UK.”
“Bisto is a brand that believes in bringing people together. Loneliness amongst the elderly is an increasing problem in the UK with our ageing population and Bisto’s Spare Chair Sunday is again working hard to change that,” added Laurence Thomson, chief creative officer from McCann London.
“It was a real privilege to work on this initiative, which celebrates what Christmas is all about – kindness and togetherness.”
McCann was the lead brand and creative agency while Weber Shandwick led the PR activation. The media agency was Carat.
Credits:
Creative Directors: Matt Crabtree & Si Hepton
Creatives: Robin Gordon & Ella Monti
Business Lead: Oliver Morgan
Account Director: Mel Caplan
Account Manager: Jenny Spindler
Project Director: Jon Marshall
Project Manager: Pru Ainslie
Production company: Craft
Senior Producer: Claire Hopkins
Business Affairs: Danielle Gilbert & Nicholas Mugridge
