Change4Life meets the Simpsons

From Monday, 5 October to Christmas Day 2009 inclusive, Change4Life will sponsor The Simpsons on Channel 4.

This provides Change4Life with an excellent opportunity to communicate in an impactful and credible way with its target families. The show is very popular with them and is also watched at dinner time, an ideal time to remind parents about what and how much their kids are eating and encourage them to get and about, rather than vegging out.

Change4Life has always sought innovative and imaginative ways of influencing behavioural change, which is demonstrated by the whole style of the campaign, and this sponsorship is a continuation of its approach.

The Simpsons


A hugely popular and long-running show in this country, The Simpsons provides Change4Life with an opportunity to partner with a TV programme that gives the campaign the most exposure, impact and credibility with its target audience.

While some characters in The Simpsons – Homer, in particular – are well known for having a poor diet and taking little exercise, Change4Life seeks to offer support towards a healthier lifestyle, rather than criticise. The family also displays a number of positive behaviours. They often sit around the dining table together as a family, are clearly a close and tight-knit unit and Bart and Lisa lead very active lifestyles: Bart is known for his love of skateboarding, for example.

Format and timings

The Simpsons is broadcast on Channel 4 every weekday evening at 6pm.

Sponsorship ‘idents’ at the beginning, middle and end of each show will feature the characters from the Change4Life advertising campaign in a number of different scenarios. The strapline at the end of each of them is “Change4Life – supporting The Simpsons. Sometimes.”

The line is designed to demonstrate in a humourous way that Change4Life supports many aspects of The Simpsons, but not all of them. It celebrates the positive elements of the family’s behaviour and, by implication, encourages viewers to make changes for life for their own families in terms of diet and activity levels.

Target audience

The Simpsons on Channel 4 is a highly popular TV programme for Change4Life target families and is among the top 20 highest rating programmes among them. It also has a very broad appeal and attracts audiences from across the entire social spectrum. The sponsorship will, therefore, help the campaign to reach a high proportion of families who need encouragement and support to improve their diet and levels of physical activity, as well as reaching them in a way which is both credible and accessible.

We investigated the possibility of sponsoring The Simpsons on Sky One but it already had a sponsor. While Sky One shows the most recent series of the show, the programme’s viewing figures on this channel are substantially lower than those on Channel 4 – BARB figures for week ending 9 August showed that The Simpsons attracted an audience of 0.67 million on Sky One, compared to 2.04 million on Channel 4.

Change4Life Campaign Update

1. Autumn activity

This Autumn, Change4Life marketing activity will focus on promoting 3 of the 8 Change4Life behaviours: sugar swaps, me sized meals, and 5 A DAY.

A new Change4Life TV commercial launches on 19 October and runs until 15 November. The advert shows the all-too-familiar tale of how kids often get their own way when it comes to eating unhealthy snacks. A Snack Swapper – a wheel device that shows healthy options to sugary, salty or fatty snacks and meals – is seen in the ad (see visual attached) and at the end informs the public they can call Change4Life to request one.

We will also be distributing 400,000 Snack Swappers via a magazine partnership, and over a million through Schools, Sure Start Children’s Centres and Child Minders. Additionally we will make them available to order in bulk via the DH Orderline (w/c 19 October – Product Code: C4L085). www.orderline.dh.gov.uk




This activity will be supported by Autumn consumer packs, called ‘eat happy this autumn’, being mailed directly to 200,000 families who have already signed up to our customer relationship marketing programme. This pack is a follow-up pack to the Summer Survival Kit, and, like the TV, will focus on healthy food options. The pack will consist of a variety of items including tips and recipes, me size meals, sugar swaps and 5 A DAY info, competitions, crosswords, puzzles, a prize draw and a Snack Swapper.

The Change4Life website will feature complementary content including a variation on the Snack Swapper wheel (using drop down menus) along with a new recipe section and sugar swap, me size meals and 5 A DAY information.

The Change4Life activity complements the next phase of the Food Standards Agency’s public awareness campaign on salt, launching on 5 October. The campaign aims to highlight how people can make a difference to their salt intake by checking the labels of the foods they eat regularly and choosing the lower salt option. It will feature TV, press and poster advertising as well as providing more detailed advice to consumers through leaflets and online at: www.eatwell.gov.uk/salt

2. BME activity

Dates for a number of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) focused half-day conferences have been confirmed and venues booked - programmes are currently being finalised. Each location will focus on one or two specific BME communities and there will be two conferences in each of the locations:

• one providing health professionals with the cultural insight for dealing with some of the barriers to behaviour change for families in our target communities;
• one targeting community and religious leaders, seeking their endorsement of C4L as key influencers in their communities and arming them with information to provide help and advice to families.

Local dates and target communities are as follows:

Bradford - Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities
18th November: Stakeholder/Health Professionals
19th November: Community Leaders


A consumer facing poster and flyer will be made available to delegates to distribute in their communities, which will direct families to a helpline where they will be able to order a BME specific information pack (English only or bi-lingual). A toolkit of material is being developed for non-participating regions and will include a DVD of the event presentations – this will be available later this Autumn. The consumer facing BME campaign is due to launch in January 2010.

If you have any queries about this activity please contact Julie Vazquez: julie.vazquez@dh.gsi.gov.uk

3. Campaign Analysis

The campaign continues to go from strength to strength. This month the Change4Life website hit the 1 million mark for total visits to the site.

Local Supporter numbers are making a steady climb – our current number is 22,605. Local support is a vital part of embedding Change4Life and we are keen to encourage more people to register with the campaign: www.nhs.uk/change4life/Pages/Partners.aspx

Levels of awareness, recognition and comprehension remain high amongst mothers. Please find attached the latest summary slide for some of the key Tracker Survey statistics. In August we added new questions on the tracker survey, which aim to further explore how the brand is perceived. Respondents to the survey are now being given pairs of statements about Change4Life (e.g. It is judgmental vs. it is supportive) and asked to give it a score from 1 to 5 (where 1 is judgmental and 5 is supportive). Please find attached a brand metrics table that shows the mean scores for each set of statements for mothers and for adults. This is an exceptionally encouraging set of results - Change4Life scores over 4 for over half of the attributes amongst mothers and never falls below 3.4 for adults. Overall, it would seem that Change4Life is perceived by mothers to be clear, trustworthy, supportive and to fit into their lifestyles. This is a great start but a tough act to maintain over time!

The How Are The Kids questionnaire analysis is just in. Looking at the period February to August 2009 we’ve pulled out a few of key facts and figures from the analysis. The questionnaire was conceived to help people recognise that their own families may be at risk and provide a means to engage them in a long-term customer relationship marketing programme. The questions were constructed around the eight behaviours and encouraged parents to re-evaluate their children’s performance against them, with the promise of a free personalised action plan on completion.

In total we received 266,955 clean responses (a small percentage of the total responses were returned with errors or information missing and these had to be discarded). This number of respondents gives us information about the eating and exercise habits of 422,345 children aged between 2-16 years.

Over 11 million of the questionnaires were distributed through a range of channels as well as the questionnaire being made available online. 30% of responses (80,044) were submitted online. The top five offline sources came from:

• Schools: 19.1% (50,952) - questionnaires were distributed within fruit and veg boxes
• Targeted Door Drop: 17.7% (47,384)
• Healthy Start Mailing: 8.3% (22,025)
• Third Party: 5.1% (13,606)
• Face To Face Activity: 5.1% (13,562)

Overall, this was very well targeted activity. 87% of responders were female. 64% of responses came from families with at least one child aged 5-11. The high risk cluster groups in England were the most responsive to the questionnaire (72% in Clusters 1, 2, 3 and 5, with nearly a third in Cluster 5). Respondents were asked to opt-in to receive future Change4Life communications and a massive number did so - over 80% - this is an unusually high opt-in rate. Clusters 1, 2, 3 and 5 were more likely to opt-in to postal communications, phone and text, while low-risk clusters (4 and 6) preferred email.

The How Are The Kids survey is still available online: www.nhs.uk/change4life



4. Commercial Partners activity



PepsiCo has just launched a Play4Life poster advertising campaign to encourage parents to take their kids out to play more. The posters do not carry any PepsiCo branding but feature top international football players Thierry Henry and Frank Lampard. Please see attached Play4Life poster visuals.

You can read up on some of our other partners here: www.nhs.uk/change4life/Pages/OurPartnersLogos.aspx




5. Early Years Toolkit

The Early Years Toolkit has been produced and will be available to download by early October from the Partners and Supporters area on the Change4Life website. The toolkit is aimed at Local Supporters working with toddlers and pre-school children between the age of one and four. We are sending the toolkit directly to over 3,000 Sure Start Children’s Centres. Included in the toolkit is practical advice, low-cost healthy recipes, tips for fussy eaters, posters, stickers and ideas of how to keep youngsters moving around and having fun. A small number of the toolkits are available to order on 0300 123 3434 (from early October). www.nhs.uk/change4life/Pages/PartnerTools.aspx

6. Smallsteps4Life

From October, teachers are being encouraged to get involved with smallsteps4life – an innovative programme that can be used in the classroom to motivate and support pupils as they take small steps in improving their health and wellbeing. Smallsteps4life is a sub brand of Change4Life and aims to help primary and secondary pupils to set themselves small, achievable lifestyle challenges (either as individuals or as groups) around three themes - Healthy Eating, Getting Active, Feeling Good. The project is lead by the Food Standards Agency. Teachers and young people have had an important role in helping to develop the website, which will enable schools to promote what they are doing and share their experiences to inspire other schools across the UK. The website will be live in the next few days: www.direct.gov.uk/smallsteps4life

7. Swimming Stroke competition winner

Andy Burnham announced the winner of the Change4Life ‘invent a new swimming stroke’ competition. The announcement came at the Great North Swim and the winner was Ella, aged 11, with her 'Dolphinella' creation. Ella and her friends were filmed recently at their local swimming pool for a news story on the BBC's Newsround:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_8260000/newsid_8269900/8269909.stm