Crisis UK supporter Jo Brand features in their Christmas Actionable Audio Ad campaign

It’s nearly that time of year again: the season of giving and receiving.

So in support of Crisis UK, we teamed up with Octave Audio to launch a digital Actionable Audio Ad campaign for smart speakers ahead of Christmas, making donating easier than ever before to support people who are homeless during the festive season.

The campaign includes two 30-second smart speaker ads from Crisis at Christmas team member Alice and comedian Jo Brand, who simply explain why Christmas is a difficult time for homeless people, especially after the pandemic, followed by suggestions on how listeners can help them.

Both smart speaker ads highlight the work Crisis do to assist people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness during Christmas in England, Wales and Scotland by providing a place to stay, advice, food, and other essentials like clothes.

The initiative follows recent research by Bauer who found that 59% of the audience listened to more radio on their smart speakers during the pandemic, with 61% stating they would continue to listen to more radio on their smart speakers after restrictions were lifted.

Our CEO, Charlie Cadbury commented: “Audio campaigns are now being engaged with ‘in the moment’ using the power of voice assistants. Having the unique response option on smart speaker devices opens new possibilities for lower funnel driven campaigns and showcases a brilliant option to utilise the power of audio on smart speaker devices.  Just say Alexa, open Crisis UK”.

What makes this audio campaign unique, besides the fact that it’s actionable and interactive, is that we can gather insights in real time to optimize the campaign as it runs. About halfway through the campaign, we switched the native Alexa voice to a recognisable voice by Jo Brand in order to see how this would affect engagement and charity donations.

Crisis UK’s creatives will be running for one month, and you can listen to both ads below.

If you’re looking for a way to give back this holiday season, and take someone out of homelessness, try it yourself, just say “Alexa, open Crisis UK”.

We’ll be discussing the results from our Actionable Audio Ad charity campaigns at Campaign’s radio audio advertising summit on the 27th of January 2022.

Additionally, you can learn more about our work and support other charities, including Alder Hey, NSPCC and Macmillan.

You can also discover how we can help charities drive donations with Actionable Audio Ads by downloading our whitepaper now.