We recently had the opportunity to see several campaigns about breast cancer. I’d like to confront two of them to show how they succeeded to catch their audience.
The first one is based in Singapore targeting women for breast examination with 3 prints. The second one is a Polish campaign based on viral advertising for men. It trains them to examine their partners’ breast and encourage breast cancer screening.
Prints for women
The Breast Cancer Foundation of Singapore offered a new awareness campaign created by DDB Singapore to promote breast examination.
They chose humour through body painting to pass their message. Breasts are really well integrated in those paintings and become an entire part of it, like jean’s buttons or pimple. Drawing women like comics with some of their complexes and obsessions is really clever. It creates an opposition between appearance and what matters. The artistic direction is also really well done and adapted to the target: humour and self-derision with an artistic dimension. Women can picture themselves in those situations. It increases the chance that the message reach the audience, have an impact and encourage them to go to breast exam.
Viral advertising for men
This campaign, created by Change Integrated Poland, is original because it is for men who are not directly concerned by breast cancer. Quite a challenge! They chose to create a viral advertising campaign.
It was integrated in the front page of one of the most famous website in the adult part. They replaced one of the pictures with their own. The idea is that men will click on it and start following instructions show by the woman. In playing they will learn how to examine their partner’s breast and help prevent breast cancer. They only discover the aim of this game at the end of the slide-show.
In terms of communications, I think that it is a good strategy and seems to be a success:
- Viral advertising is a good way to communicate about an event or a cause: around 175 000 person have seen this campaign and be trained in a week. Moreover, viral advertising has generally an important impact and success like Tippex or WWF with the exibition 1600 pandas.
- The cost: It is less expensive to train men through this kind of on-line support than off-line breast check training courses. Nevertheless, I don’t think that we can compare them – in terms of quality – but it seems to be a good introduction. It can also reach more people and increase the chance to encourage them to be more concerned about it.
- The audience: they targeted men for this campaign and it seems that they found a good way to reach them. This campaign can be a subject of criticism because they sexualized cancer. It is true that the campaign aid is an adult website so in this way I have to agree. Showing breast to say that it is not shameful or lewd thing like in nursing or to prevent you from breast cancer is one thing and maybe in choosing this communication aid they went too far.
They succeeded to adapt with success a delicate subject to a public which is not directly concerned. So it was important to speak about this campaign. In addition they used a viral strategy which seems to be a raising practice in nonprofit.
The interesting point of those campaigns is that they spoke about the same subject in targeting two different audiences. They also chose two strategies: prints and viral advertising. We can notice that they both had some lightness in it – comic drawings and game – adapted to their target to reach them. They both tried to integrate people habits or life to pass the message and add it in their life.
Source: adsoftheworld.com, osocio.org
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