How Cancer Research UK and WPP Media Turned Science Into Compelling TV

When the TV series Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures picked up two trophies at this year’s Campaign Media Awards — winning Public Sector & Charities and Best Use of Insight — it did so by proving that brand-funded programming doesn't need to feel or look like branded content at all. It's probably why the series has also been nominated for best branded entertainment at this year's Edinburgh TV Festival Awards.

The three-part Channel 4 documentary series, created in partnership with Cancer Research UK, WPP Media’s EssenceMediacom, Channel 4 and Dragonfly North, set out to do something more ambitious than simply raise awareness. It aimed to make the science behind cancer research more visible, more human and more hopeful.

Rather than asking people to support Cancer Research UK through a conventional campaign, it took viewers inside the work the charity funds: from a lung cancer vaccine designed to stop cancer before it starts, to other breakthroughs in detection, treatment and prevention. It showed the scientists driving that work, but also the patients whose lives sit at the centre of it.

For Nicola Smedley, director of marketing and digital at Cancer Research UK, the move into advertiser-funded programming was a way of tackling one of the charity’s hardest communications challenges: how to explain the complexity of cancer, and the progress being made against it, in a way that people can properly understand.

“Explaining cancer is complex,” she says. “Cancer Research UK works across more than 200 forms of cancer and explaining why cancer has not yet been solved is complicated. Being able to do that in a longer-form way — talking about research innovation, how it is affecting people, and the scientists behind the work — felt really powerful.”

The thinking emerged from a brand refresh a couple of years ago, Smedley says, as the charity considered how it could evolve the way it talks about its work. “We were working on a brand refresh and thinking about how to evolve the way we talk about our work: how we have more impact with the public, bring more of our work to them, and give people more hope around the advances we’re making in research” she says.

At the same time, Smedley says, after Covid-19 there was a greater public appetite to understand science and engage with science content. That created an opportunity for Cancer Research UK to go deeper than a traditional campaign would allow.

“We started by asking: what are the opportunities to tell stories in a different, more engaging way? What would allow us to combine scientific breakthrough, the impact on people with cancer, and the hope that creates?” she says.

Cancer Research UK already had experience of longer-form storytelling through its relationship with Channel 4 around Stand Up To Cancer. But Cancer Detectives was different. It was the charity’s first fully-funded programming project of this kind.

For Daniel Wood, SVP, Sports and Entertainment at WPP Media, the idea was rooted in a simple tension. Those close to Cancer Research UK understand the scale and significance of the work it funds. But the wider public does not necessarily see that work or understand the stories behind it.

“When you work on Cancer Research UK, you know the incredible stories and the work the organisation is doing,” he says. “But we were very conscious that those stories are not necessarily understood by everyone in the UK.”

That made Channel 4 an obvious target. The broadcaster had an existing relationship with the charity, but more importantly it had a reputation for human-led, emotionally intelligent storytelling — the kind that could handle scientific accuracy without losing the audience.

Cancer Research UK needed to make clear the story they wanted to tell: not just a story about cancer, but a story about the scientists working to change its future. Wood says Channel 4 quickly saw the storytelling potential.

“They felt it was a message their audience needed to hear,” he says.

From there, the partners worked to find the right production company. Several proposals were considered before Dragonfly North was selected for its ability to handle both the science and the human stories with care.

The result was a close partnership between Cancer Research UK, WPP Media, Channel 4 and Dragonfly. Smedley’s team brought deep knowledge of the charity’s research, scientists and patient stories, while Channel 4 and Dragonfly shaped that material into a broadcast proposition and the WPP Media team brokered and strategically developed the partnership.

The challenge was to make the programme feel unmistakably connected to Cancer Research UK without turning it into an awkward brand vehicle. That balance was critical.

“We proposed stories we felt had real interest, either because of the cancer type or their current-day impact. For example, one story was around a lung vaccine, which is about stopping cancer before it starts,” Smedley says. “The scientists tell the stories around the work they are doing, but the people going through treatment were chosen because they were in the system at that moment. They were not chosen by us because they said something specific about Cancer Research UK.”

Smedley says Cancer Research UK’s role was to show Channel 4 and Dragonfly the science stories it had available, including the lung vaccine work, and help narrow those down to the three that would sit at the heart of the one-hour programmes for maximum engagement.

Once the programmes were complete, the charity reviewed them for factual accuracy. But the storytelling itself belonged to the broadcaster and producer.

“Editorial control sat totally with Channel 4,” says Smedley. “This was an AFP, so the process was theirs rather than ours.”

The process was also relatively fast. Early conversations began around 14 months before the series went on air, but from a fully fledged brief to broadcast took around 10 months.

Wood says that is quick for a project of this kind. Many AFP projects take about a year, and this one carried additional complexity because of the sensitivity and factual precision required.

The other important factor was that Channel 4 was not treated simply as a media platform. It was a full partner in the project.

For Wood, that matters. In an era when any brand can publish content into digital channels, there is still a particular value in creating work for the linear television schedule — especially when the subject carries the weight and importance of cancer research.

“Producing work of this quality and importance with a national broadcaster elevates the impact,” he says.

But the programme was only one part of the wider campaign. Cancer Research UK built a broader activation around Cancer Detectives, using the three programmes as the centrepiece for a wider breakthroughs campaign across its website, social channels and other media.

The campaign ran for around six weeks, with activity before the programmes aired and further activation afterwards. Some of the content is still being used now.

The detail went right down to Cancer Research UK’s shops, where staff and volunteers were given cards with information about the show so they could talk to people about the stories featured in the programme, making sure the work delivered as much value as possible.

“The card helped people understand the stories in the programme so they could talk about them,” Smedley says. For Smedley, that mattered because Cancer Research UK’s retail estate gave the campaign a more human route into conversation. Many of the people who work or volunteer for the charity have a close personal connection to cancer. Giving them the tools to talk about scientific breakthroughs helped extend the impact of the series beyond broadcast.

“Creating an environment where they could have a good conversation about scientific breakthrough and improvement was really positive,” she says.

The results suggest the approach worked. At the time the programming went out, Cancer Research UK’s brand consideration stood at around 54 per cent. Over roughly three months around the campaign, that rose to 58 per cent — a significant movement on the charity’s monthly metric, which tracks how many people would give to Cancer Research UK if they were given a pound tomorrow.

The impact was not only reputational. Compared with the 10 weeks before the programmes went live, regular giving rose by 39 per cent during the programming weeks, while cash giving rose by 59 per cent. On the day of the second episode, Cancer Research UK recorded its highest day of regular giving for the whole year.

For Smedley, the lesson is not simply that Cancer Research UK should repeat the same model. It is that longer-form storytelling can play an important role in helping people understand the charity’s mission, provided the approach continues to evolve.

“We will absolutely do things that push us further into longer-form storytelling,” she says. “But whether we do it in exactly the same way is still to be confirmed.”

Wood agrees. The next iteration may look different, but the principles will remain the same: finding human-led stories that deepen understanding and support for Cancer Research UK.

For brands more broadly, he argues, branded entertainment is no longer a novelty or an experimental side project. It is now part of the communications toolbox — particularly for organisations with complex stories that need more time, more nuance and more emotional weight than conventional advertising can provide.

The routes to market for longer-form stories are only growing. But Cancer Detectives shows that the best examples are not created by stretching a campaign into content. They are built by finding the right story, the right partner and the right level of trust.

For Cancer Research UK, that meant turning science into television. More importantly, it meant turning complexity into connection.