Supporting Yorkshire Water in engaging with their 5.2 million customers

Yorkshire Water  ensures that all 5.2 million people in their supply area have clean and safe drinking water on tap and that their wastewater is taken away.

Yorkshire Water look after communities, protect the environment, and plan ahead to look after Yorkshire’s water, today, tomorrow, always. 24/7, 365 days a year, they provide essential water and wastewater services to every corner of the Yorkshire region and play a key role in the region’s health, well-being, and prosperity.

We’ve worked with Yorkshire Water for a number of years, supporting them engaging their communities including a recent smart meter awareness campaign that covered the Sheffield area and included ITV, Channel 4, Spotify, out-of-home advertising and other digital platforms.

Smart Meter Campaign – Customer Awareness

We were recently commissioned by Yorkshire Water to create an engaging awareness campaign for the smart meter rollout across the Sheffield area.

Working within Yorkshire Water’s brand guidelines and image style, we developed a relatable campaign that highlighted everyday water usage in the home with the smart meter in mind. Featuring authentic imagery, engaging videos, and real-life colleagues out in the field, the campaign clearly communicated the benefits of smart water meters and prepared customers for the upcoming installations.

Our in-house studio brought the campaign to life across multiple formats, including large-scale assets, TV, and radio.

We led on all stages from concept development to script creation, to sourcing the voiceover artist, while directing the production of both TV and radio adverts, ensuring a seamless and high-quality output.

The media plan for the campaign strategically reached targeted postcodes using:

  • Out-of-home (OOH) placements, such as kiosks in community hotspots and large roadside billboards in high-traffic areas.
  • Digital advertising, including a targeted TV advert on ITVx, Channel 4 streaming, and Sky VOD. This ran over the festive season, capturing families gathered for Christmas programming. We also leveraged ITV’s innovative ‘pause ads,’ which display when viewers pause their TV.
  • Social media coverage on Facebook and YouTube, designed to maximise visibility and engagement.

The campaign’s performance was impressive, with over a million impressions through the campaign including 419,772 impressions on META and 218,433 video views on YouTube.

Graduate and Apprenticeship Videos

We’ve recently supported Yorkshire Water in creating a series of videos that support their graduate and apprenticeship schemes available within the business. The series follows a selection of real colleagues within Yorkshire Water, explaining their different growth and development journeys.

From the script and storyboard we created, we then led a two-day film shoot that captured employees out on site and in the office who had started their careers at Yorkshire Water in either an apprenticeship or graduate role. They told their story of their progression through a relaxed interview style using ‘b roll’ style content showcasing their everyday role and activities.

In total, we produced three videos capturing Yorkshire Water’s graduate scheme and apprenticeship placements, and all varying outputs of music/non-music and sub-titles/no sub-titles. These videos have been well received and are already in-use for internal purposes, they are to be used for internal and external audiences to support and raise awareness of these great development pathway opportunities.

Please note: The work featured in this case study was undertaken while operating as Blumilk, prior to our rebrand as the Utilities Marketing Agency (UMA). You can read more of our history here.

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