Bowel Cancer Awareness Month Campaign

The brief

'You have bowel cancer' - four words you don't expect to hear when you're young.

Each year over 1,700 young Australians are diagnosed with bowel cancer. Bowel Cancer Australia focus each June on raising awareness of the signs, symptoms and statistics of the disease, with the aim of drawing attention to the rapidly growing number of young people affected. Bowel cancer claims the lives of 103 Australians every week (5,350 people a year) - but it's one of the most treatable types of cancer when detected early. While the risk of bowel cancer increases significantly with age, the disease doesn't discriminate, bowel cancer is the leading cancer killer for Australians aged 25-44, though the national testing kit program only caters for those 45 and over (Bowel Cancer Australia, 2024).  

In 2024 Bowel Cancer Australia set aside $500,000 to invest into sharing the never too young messaging in an effort to create a sense of urgency, explore lucky escapes, highlight how to identify symptoms and bring real patient testimonials to life.

With a focus on people aged 25-44, but ideally looking to raise awareness amongst the entire Australian population we needed a unique solution. We aimed to connect with our audience in a non-traditional way for the non-profit industry to shift brand perceptions and cut through in an increasingly homogenous and competitive category.

The 2024 Bowel Cancer Australia campaign leveraged a bold, blockbuster-style media approach to captivate audiences and elevate awareness of bowel cancer in young Australians. By using cinematic storytelling, dramatic visuals, and strategic media placements, we achieved record-breaking engagement, extensive reach, and impressive ROI—turning a critical health message into an unmissable, high-impact campaign that resonated nationwide.

The idea

Rather than simply focusing on the facts, and perpetuating the information available on the Bowel Cancer Australia website, Ogilvy recommended a change of direction in order to capture attention.

The 2024 creative focused on real life testimonials to drive home messaging, but more than just sharing patient stories, the creative was set up in a horror movie style, with sinister messaging like “CREATURE SUCKS LIFE OUT OF 31-YEAR-OLD PERTH MAN.” This creative direction inspired a shift away from a typical spots and dots campaign, with the media campaign instead focused on bringing to life the campaign as though it was the blockbuster of the summer.

With this in mind, we pulled together a plan including television placements, a national out of home campaign, audio content surrounding true crime podcasts, online video, display and content strategies, underpinned by a consistent community service announcement campaign running across all media channels to ensure Bowel Cancer Australia was scarily unmissable.

How it worked

Though June is bowel cancer awareness month, it was a cluttered month with end of financial year messages in market, the Olympics approaching, and the competitive nature of the charitable landscape in Australia. With this in mind, we proposed beginning the campaign early in 2024, beginning in early May would allow us to build up towards our key awareness month and inevitably interact with more Australians throughout the period, and more than this, this campaign length aligned perfectly with the marketing timeline of a blockbuster film, think Oppenheimer but make it socially responsible

So, beginning 13th May 2024, we launched to market a national outdoor campaign, leveraging shopping centres and large format roadsides, through to street furniture and   transport media to reach our target audience with relevant messaging. This campaign was further personalised by focusing in-market messaging at a state-based level with real patient stories.

A brand uplift study conducted by Cartology showed a 6% increase in brand awareness, an 8% increase in consideration and 35% of the population having recalled interacting with the campaign.

To complement our outdoor campaign, we partnered with content publisher Linkby to educate our audience about the symptoms of bowel cancer and the importance of consulting a doctor if they experience any symptoms. The purpose of introducing content via Linkby was two-fold, we were able to appear alongside youth publications and tap into a difficult to reach audience in a native environment without sacrificing our key points by leaving things to the PR gods. Furthermore, the content appearing in the likes of Urban List and SITCHU aligned directly with the blockbuster strategy and drove incredible engagement results.

The campaign achieved record-breaking clicks and the second highest click-through rate (CTR) in Linkby history, even when compared against global brands, sales messaging and you guessed it, film releases. It was shared across 21 premium publishers, reaching various audience demographics within our broader target group.

To further target niche audience demographics, we leveraged digital audio on the Listnr network. By focusing on true crime podcasts, we effectively engaged a younger female audience in a contextually relevant and powerful environment. This strategy allowed us to achieve significant reach and a highly engaged listener.

Given budget constraints, we strategically utilised broader-reaching digital formats to support this activity, including YouTube, BVOD pre-roll and mid-roll ads, as well as programmatic standard display.

Our striking creative content, resonated deeply with the audience. By allocating half of our budget to these digital channels, we achieved over 13.3 million impressions, significantly enhancing the overall reach of the campaign message.

The results

As a secondary call to action within the campaign there is a small donation drive on Bowel Cancer Australia’s National fundraising day – Red Apple Day which fell on June 19th in 2024. To engage a wide national audience, we aired a segment on Channel 7’s The Morning Show to 447,000 engaged viewers to push this donation messaging, which resulted in the highest number of donations ever received by over 25%!

We successfully locked away an impressive:

• $2,347,000 worth of Community Service Announcement activity
• Spanning 22 different publishers
• And, seven traditional and digital channels

This was an audacious, blockbuster-style campaign that demanded attention, cut through the noise, and made bowel cancer awareness inescapable in 2024.

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