Inside The Times and Nutmeg’s ‘Couch to £5k’ financial boot camp
Winning The Drum Awards for Content in the Finance category was a campaign from Nutmeg and Times Money Mentor that drew inspiration from the revolutionary NHS Couch to 5K app. Here is the award-winning case study.
Inside The Times and Nutmeg's 'Couch to £5k' financial boot camp
Couch to £5k was a six-week multi-media campaign run by Times Money Mentor at the start of 2024 to help readers get financially fit.
Drawing inspiration from the revolutionary NHS Couch to 5K app, Times Money Mentor set out to ease readers into giving themselves a financial audit and save £5,000 in a year via its six-week newsletter course.
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The campaign incorporated every media channel at the team's disposal with the objectives of:
- Significantly raising brand awareness
- Position Times Money Mentor as the go-to money site
- Opening up new revenue streams
- Increasing newsletter and newspaper subscribers, social media figures, extra views on the site
- Cement C25K as an annual flagship campaign
The final product was months in the planning, requiring coordination across multiple News UK divisions. The result:
- Every week, a specially crafted newsletter would guide readers through topics such as budgeting, debt and maximizing their finances.
- In tandem, instagram content creator Mel followed the course, creating a video diary. A self-confessed fitness fanatic who admitted to often feeling anxious about her finances, Mel produced engaging and instructive reels - and saved £5,000.
- Times Money Mentor also mentored four sets of readers through the course: Adam who was grappling with grief and debt, Audrey who struggled with the impulse spending related to her ADHD, self-employed Jo and Alex who wanted to start a pension, and Louise and Paul who wanted to grow a nest egg for their child. A print supplement revealed that, collectively, they were able to save a potential £30,000.
- The campaign had an impact: starting conversations on social media, increasing subscribers by 5%, driving extra site views, appearing on national radio and television, achieving a total social media reach of 264,000 and feeding into a wider Times-Nutmeg campaign that saw 3,796,000 UK adults reached in print and 1,776,000 video views across social.
C25K will now be a Times Money Mentor annual flagship campaign, growing in strength each year to drive traffic to our website, open up revenue and partnership opportunities and encourage more people to take control of their finances.
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