Giving valuable life stories a platform
Wisdom of the Ages is a video interview series built around relaxed, respectful conversations with people aged 60 and over. Participants discuss love, life, loss and the experiences they want to pass on to friends, family and future generations.
The project was looking for London-based participants and wanted the guest list to represent a wider range of communities and lived experiences.
Personal outreach was producing too little volume
Founder Oli Corse had spent a month trying to recruit guests personally. The process required significant time, but it was not creating enough suitable applications or the breadth of participation the series needed.
The task was not simply to generate cheap form fills. The campaign needed to reach people who understood the project, felt represented by the invitation and were genuinely willing to take part in a filmed conversation.
Make the right people recognise themselves in the campaign
I recommended using Meta because the project did not depend on people actively searching for “podcast guest opportunities.” Facebook and Instagram could place the invitation directly in front of relevant London audiences and make the opportunity understandable within the advert itself.
The advertising explained the value of sharing personal stories rather than presenting the project as a generic casting call.
The visuals reflected the kinds of participants the project genuinely wanted to hear from, helping the audience see that the invitation included them.
The campaign combined the intended geography and audience with clear creative, allowing the message itself to do much of the qualification.
This was particularly important because representation could not be treated as a line of copy added to otherwise generic advertising. The people, tone and purpose of the project needed to be visible immediately.
A faster and more effective recruitment route
The campaign generated more high-quality guests in a couple of days than Oli had found during an entire month of personal outreach. The approximate cost per lead was 69p.
The value was not just the low CPL. The advertising reduced the time Oli needed to spend finding participants manually and gave the project a route it could use again.
“I was struggling to find guests for my podcast. Layton recommended running targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram, and I was shocked by how effective they were. He managed to find more high-quality guests in a couple of days than I had through an entire month of personal outreach. Best of all, the cost per lead was around 69p. I’ll 100% be using this strategy again and wish I’d asked Layton for help much sooner.”Oli Corse · Founder, Wisdom of the Ages
What other small businesses and organisations can take from it
- Search demand is not the only form of demand.
People do not need to be actively searching for an opportunity to recognise that it is relevant when it appears.
- Creative can qualify before the form.
Specific imagery and language help the right person understand the invitation and help irrelevant people move on.
- Manual outreach takes time.
Paid media can still be useful when the immediate goal is not a sale, particularly when it replaces a slow manual search or recruitment process.
- The cheapest lead is not the full result.
Lead quality, suitability and the time saved are what made the campaign genuinely useful.
What this result does and does not prove
This campaign shows what can happen when the channel, purpose, audience and creative are closely aligned. It does not mean every service or community campaign will produce 69p leads. Costs vary by market, offer, geography, creative, competition and the commitment required from the person responding.
The repeatable part is the process: understand what makes someone relevant, make that relevance visible in the advert and measure whether the resulting enquiries are genuinely useful.