Blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan's latest multimedia ad campaign is deliberately "intrusive". Chrystyna Chymera, who led on the campaign, tells us why.
Name: | "Yeah, we hate these adverts too" |
Target audience: | Young men, aged 16 - 30 |
Duration: | December 2012 - March 2013 |
Location: | Online, radio, Topman and gyms |
Basic overview: | A multimedia "intrusive" campaign using location-specific adverts which 'invade the user's space'. The idea is to encourage the observer to understand that they have the power to remove the adverts that "we hate too", by joining the bone marrow register. |
What is the aim of the campaign?
We want to increase awareness of Anthony Nolan among 16 to 24-year-old men. They are really important to us as bone marrow donors and supporters and so it’s important they know what Anthony Nolan is and how they can be part of what we do. For most people blood cancer is something they’ve heard of but it might not be something they think about all the time. We want to put it at the forefront of their minds and let them know that they can do something about it.
Why is it needed now?
Every 20 minutes someone in the UK is diagnosed with a blood cancer such as leukaemia. For many of these, a bone marrow transplant is their last chance of life. While we find a matching bone marrow donor for three people every day, sadly we can’t find a match for everyone who needs one.
Young men who join the Anthony Nolan register are most likely to be chosen by doctors to donate but currently there are not enough of them signed up. Our aim is to find a matching donor for every person who needs a transplant and to do this we need to reach out to more young men.
What is different about the campaign?
The concept for this campaign has emerged from the nature of space and how people use it. We’ve targeted our adverts at the spaces which young men inhabit, both physical and digital. The adverts invade that space in an intrusive and interruptive manner.
Whilst there are still people out there who need a bone marrow transplant, we will continue to act. The campaign explains that we have to resort to advertising in these areas as the audience is yet to act on the issue of blood cancer. But we present an opportunity for them – by joining our register and curing blood cancer, they will render these ads unnecessary.
As a result, we can remove them, and the audience will be free to occupy the area, be it a changing room, gym or even online, without being interrupted by our advertising.
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Who was involved in its design?
The poster elements and online banner adverts were all done by our amazing in-house team at Anthony Nolan.
Creative director on the video and radio was Hemant Jain, who worked alongside creatives Debs Gerrard and Laura Muse from Albion London. Stitch That was the film production company, and it was directed by Martyn Thomas. Total Media handled the media planning and buying, and the film is being seeded by the7thChamber.
How long did this process take and what was the process like?
We began planning our campaign and appointing the planners in September and briefed our in house team in October. We ran some focus groups to test concepts in early November. By the end of November all the media had been bought and the digital adverts went live in December.
Albion London came on board in October and we recorded and filmed the radio and video adverts in early December. So from start to finish it took just five months.
What will success look like and when will you know if it's been successful?
We have tracking on all our digital adverts and some specific landing pages for other elements of the campaign. We are also running pre-, mid- and post-campaign surveys to check what impact our campaign had and what messages the audience took from them.
Success will be meeting our targets for click throughs and website visits and a substantial increase in awareness in the tracking survey. The early numbers are looking fantastic – almost double our target.
The final outcome will be more engagement with young men, more people joining the bone marrow register, and more lives saved.
Chrystyna Chymera is marketing manager at Anthony Nolan
