The challenge
Men continue to face a health crisis that isn’t being talked about with one man committing suicide every minute of every day.
We teamed up with The Movember Foundation who are committed to changing the face of men's health and created a powerful cross-platform campaign to drive an understanding of the causes supported by the charity.
We had two tasks: to raise awareness of what the Movember Foundation does, and generate excitement around Movember to increase participation and donations.
The idea
We looked at the types of content men consumed, analysed their emotional responses to it, and researched the topics they most talked about (both on and off-line). Sport, news, leisure and travel were the biggest topics. Personal stuff didn’t even get a look-in.
We discovered a “taboo” still exists around men’s feelings. Simply put, men are scared to open up about the stuff that worries them. Money stresses, depression, loneliness: men carry these feelings alone, rather than “burden” friends or families with them. A lump found on their testicles? Feeling tired or overwhelmed? These are shrugged off, with a hope that “it’ll go away on its own”.
But sometimes it doesn’t.
Our research found one of the principle reasons that some men are dying too young: because they are too afraid to talk about their feelings.
If Movember was to be a big success we had to break this taboo.
The execution
We created #FOMO(vember) – a reminder to all men that a fear of opening up about your feelings or troubles is nowhere near as terrifying as the “Fear of Missing Out” – of dying too young, and missing out on what the rest of your life can offer.
We created a phenomenal 350 pieces of content over 45 days in the hope of raising awareness to #stopmendyingtooyoung. The content was published across The Times & The Sunday Times, The Sun, Talk Sport and Sky via video, social, digital, print, events and broadcast media.
The results
The campaign was a huge success. We drove more than 50,000 sign-ups to the charity – beating our target by more than 250 per cent and increased donations by 16 per cent. We also had a 48% improvement in understanding the purpose of Movember to reduce preventable deaths among men.
We also won a load of awards:
Winner: Gold for Content Strategy, Campaign Media Awards 2018
Winner: Gold for Branded Content, UK Sponsorship Awards 2018
Winner: Bronze for Commercial Campaign Strategy, British Media Awards 2018
Highly Commended: Brand Partnership of the year, News Awards 2018
Credits: Creative Direction - Darren Smith, Art Direction - Sachini Imbuldeniya, Illustration (main image) - Valentina Verc, Design - Dan Neather, Video - News Productions, Illustration (Groundhog Day) - Andrew Fairclough
