Shepherds Friendly Launches Integrated Bicentennial Marketing Campaign

Jun. 30, 2026

Shepherds Friendly has reactivated the highly successful Mutual Moments advertising series it ran last year to incorporate its own bicentennial celebrations.

The campaign focuses on Shepherds Friendly’s commitment to developing financial solutions that support its members with major life events such as buying their first home, starting a family or taking a trip of a lifetime.

After beginning an intermediary-focused initiative in February, it has now launched a new consumer-facing billboard campaign that builds on the Mutual Moments theme by integrating references to its own upcoming milestone, with radio and Meta versions launched in June. Across a six-week campaign, the 10 billboards across the UK delivered 46.4 million impacts.

The Manchester-based mutual society will celebrate 200 years of providing financial solutions to its members on Christmas Day this year, with a range of events lined up throughout the year to mark the occasion.

The Meta campaign and static billboards both feature new messaging and collateral related to the bicentennial. The six new radio adverts also reference the anniversary in their scripts, with voiceovers such as: “Whatever you’re dreaming of for your future, having a plan helps and we’ve been helping people plan for 200 years."

One of the radio spots features a man moving into his first home and incorporates a sporting theme as well as the slogan “Kick off your future”, which also appeared last month when Shepherds Friendly ran its first pitch-side ad campaign at the Challenge Cup. The radio and Meta ads will run continuously until the end of November.

In addition to the bicentennial campaign, Shepherds Friendly has also added linear TV to its advertising schedule for the first time this year, while continuing with its video-on-demand ads, with the latter now appearing on ITVX. In May, Shepherds Friendly’s video-on-demand ads delivered over a million impacts.

The first block of linear TV ads, which went live on April 1 for a month, appeared on live national daytime television on Sky channels, resulting in 12.8 million impacts. A second series of adverts will go live for an eight-week period in September and October.

The latest rollout of ads follows Shepherds Friendly’s first TV advertising campaign, which was launched last year around the similar theme of Milestone Moments.

Zac Chetwynd, Head of Marketing at Shepherds Friendly, said:

"After the success of the brand campaign last year, it’s exciting to roll out our latest multichannel campaign referencing Shepherd Friendly’s 200th anniversary, and also to make our first move into linear TV. While the messaging remains the same in that we’re here to support our members at every stage of their lives, we wanted to demonstrate our extensive history of doing so and we could think of no better way of doing this than leaning into our own milestone."