We worked with poet Jess Urlichs and created a montage that championed the strength and power of birth to spark conversations and evoke emotions across socials. Building on the success of the third season of the award-winning documentary series Emma Willis: Delivering Babies, UKTV challenged us to drive audience engagement and reinforce its reputation for powerful real-life storytelling for its fourth season. The campaign aimed to spark meaningful conversations around childbirth, enhance authenticity through raw and relatable content, and strengthen UKTV’s brand connection.

Our campaign was built on a social-first storytelling approach, using audience insights to drive emotionally compelling and highly shareable content. Engagement data revealed that audiences resonated most with raw, real, and personal stories, shaping our focus on authenticity throughout.

Collaboration was key: we partnered with poet Jess Urlichs to create a moving spoken-word piece celebrating birth and worked with influencers and new mothers to share their real birth footage, deepening relatability and emotional impact. On top of the poem audio, our talent then edited a montage of footage from their labour and birth experience, showcasing the birth journey from labour (or not) through to birth in its unfiltered glory—complete with all the highs and lows.

To boost engagement, we leveraged Instagram’s ‘Add Yours’ sticker, encouraging genuine user participation and community building. Gathering real birth footage presented ethical challenges, but by fostering trust and transparency with our talent and their communities, we ensured full consent and comfort.

The campaign launched with a powerful video featuring Jess Urlichs’ poetry over authentic footage, immediately setting an emotional tone which captured audience attention and encouraged meaningful engagement. Influential new parents with highly engaged followings amplified the campaign, ensuring organic reach and credibility.

An Instagram-first strategy maximised participation through UGC, while a targeted paid approach boosted reach. Budget was allocated to top-performing creators and content, with posts scheduled at peak times to drive show viewership.

Overall, we drove over 6.5 million views across both organic and paid, bringing over 62k people to the U streaming platform, achieving a £0.26 cost-per-engagement – our best CPE to date on U&W campaigns. We overachieved on all KPIs we set and saw tons of positive sentiment highlighting both the relatability of the show, and the content.