NHS 111 Urgent Dental Care Campaign

A geo-targeted digital campaign across South West London to raise awareness of urgent dental access via NHS 111 online, support lower-uptake communities, and capture users actively seeking urgent dental help.

South West London Integrated Care System needed a predominantly digital campaign to promote urgent dental advice and access via NHS 111, with activity focused on low-uptake wards and Core20 areas. The brief also called for translated materials, a midpoint review, and a structure that could both raise awareness and support service utilisation.

We built an integrated multi-channel campaign across Meta, YouTube, Google Search and Google Display Network, allowing awareness and intent-led activity to operate in parallel rather than in phases. Search went live slightly ahead of the wider launch to begin capturing urgent intent immediately, while the rest of the activity ran as a coordinated awareness and reinforcement programme across South West London.

The strategy was built around two core layers:

• Awareness & Behaviour Shift through Meta, YouTube and GDN across low-uptake wards and broader SWL coverage
• Intent Capture through Google Search, targeting users actively searching for urgent dental help

We also incorporated a midpoint review, ongoing optimisation, translated creative in five languages, and a ward-priority structure to focus budget where additional activity was most needed.

Meta formed the backbone of the campaign, combining broad reach with more concentrated delivery in priority low-uptake wards. Activity ran across six complementary campaigns, including tiered low-uptake targeting, broader SWL-wide awareness, traffic-driving activity and translated community campaigns in Tamil, Urdu, Polish, Korean and Spanish.

This structure allowed budget to be weighted more heavily toward areas with historically lower appointment uptake, while still maintaining wider visibility across South West London.

A key learning from the campaign was that Meta worked particularly well when awareness-led activity and action-led activity were separated, allowing broad recall campaigns to run alongside more direct traffic-driving delivery. The translated campaigns also reinforced the value of language-specific creative as part of an accessibility-led NHS communications strategy.

YouTube acted as a high-visibility video reinforcement channel, helping build recall before users reached a moment of urgent need. It complemented Meta by extending reach beyond social feeds and aligning messaging with users who had recently shown signals of interest in urgent dental care.

YouTube Video 1
YouTube Video 2

We structured YouTube across three campaign types:

• SWL-wide catch-all
• intent-driven contextual targeting
• low-uptake area focus using Core20 postcodes

This allowed YouTube to work both as a broad awareness channel and as a more targeted reinforcement layer. A clear learning from delivery was that search-based audience signals improved relevance, making YouTube more than just a passive reach channel.

Google Search captured users at the exact point they were actively looking for help. This was the only channel in the campaign mix designed to intercept existing urgent demand, rather than build awareness ahead of need.

The campaign focused on high-intent search themes such as emergency dentists, urgent dental appointments, severe toothache and knocked-out teeth, ensuring NHS 111 online was clearly positioned as the correct first step when urgency arose.

A key learning from Search was that it remained highly effective as a point-of-intent channel, especially in a competitive auction where private dental providers frequently bid aggressively on emergency-related searches. This reinforced the value of keeping Search in the mix as a capture channel rather than expecting it to play a broad awareness role.

GDN supported awareness and recall by placing NHS 111 messaging across relevant websites, apps and placements within South West London. It mirrored the YouTube intent strategy through custom intent audiences, while also supporting low-uptake postcode targeting through a dedicated campaign.

This channel worked best as a visibility and repetition layer, supporting the broader campaign message at scale and helping to keep NHS 111 online front of mind across relevant audiences and locations.

Across all reported channels, the campaign generated a total of 5,946,857 impressions, delivering significant visibility across South West London and priority low-uptake communities. A single cross-channel reach figure has not been included, as audience overlap between platforms would make a combined total misleading.

The campaign delivered a predominantly digital, geo-targeted programme across low-uptake wards in South West London, in line with the original brief, using Meta, YouTube, Google Search and GDN to build awareness of urgent dental access via NHS 111 online, reinforce the availability of urgent local appointments if needed, and highlight eligibility for free NHS dental care.

The campaign successfully combined broad awareness activity with high-intent capture. Meta, YouTube and GDN were used to build visibility, recall and repeated exposure across SWL and priority low-uptake areas, while Google Search ensured NHS 111 online was visible at the exact point users were actively seeking urgent dental help. This gave the campaign both scale and relevance, allowing awareness activity and intent-led activity to work together throughout the campaign period.

Several clear learnings emerged from the delivery. There was strong public appetite for urgent dental information, action-led Meta activity proved especially valuable alongside broader reach campaigns, translated creative added value for both accessibility and engagement, Search performed strongly as the point-of-intent channel, and YouTube and GDN both worked effectively as reinforcement channels within the wider media mix.

Overall, the campaign demonstrated that digitally led, geographically targeted activity remains an effective way to support awareness and service utilisation for urgent dental care across South West London.

This campaign successfully delivered against the core brief by combining scale, geographic targeting and intent capture. By concentrating activity in lower-uptake communities while maintaining a broader SWL presence, the campaign reinforced NHS 111 online as the correct urgent dental pathway and demonstrated that digitally led, geographically targeted activity remains an effective way to support awareness and service utilisation across South West London.