Q. How on earth do you motivate a million people of “a certain age” to take a telephone hearing test?

That was the brief for our recent Breaking the Sound Barrier campaign on behalf of the RNID.

A. In partnership with 2am Films, we produced a sequence of hard-hitting TV commercials. We organised a press release and radio interviews. We distributed the hearing test telephone number to 20,000 organisations across the UK by email, letter and postcard.

Then we persuaded the BBC’s Today programme to broadcast a specially commissioned piece of ‘hearing test’ music.

Result?

Winner. 'Best Integrated Campaign' and ‘Overall Excellence’ categories at Haymarket's 2006 Third Sector Excellence Awards.

The most successful health promotion campaign in UK history - 270,000 hearing tests to date, and we’re on schedule to reach one million within eighteen months.