CASE STUDY: TBWA earns US$1.38m in media exposure for Movember

Background

TBWA Group Singapore's campaign was based on the worldwide ‘Movember’ push in which men are asked to grow a moustache in November to raise awareness for men’s health.

The agency decided to take a different approach to appeal to young Asian audiences. In doing so, it based the creative approach on history’s most famous mustachioed men, including Mahatma Gandhi, Salvador Dali, Hulk Hogan and Freddie Mercury.

Aim

While the concept of Movember is well known in Europe and the United States, the 20-something audience in Singapore had no exposure to such a concept and little awareness of prostate cancer. The agency needed to find something that created an instant ‘spark’ to these audiences, to significantly raise their awareness on the disease.

Execution

The campaign started a massive viral conversation that was featured on thousands of blogs and led to a website where people could make donations, become fans on Facebook, apply digital moustaches on their own photos and chat with other fans.

The ads were posted on every major advertising and design site within 24 hours of launch, including Coloribus, Trendhunter, Campaign Brief Asia, Design Scene and Under Consideration.

The work was also mentioned on Twitter every few seconds for a week. The posters ended up on over 12,000 Tumblr blogs.

Results

The ads were shared with a wider audience outside the advertising industry, appearing on websites as varied as USAToday.com, Relevant Magazine, BuzzFeed, Fubiz, uFunk, The Chive and FFFFound. They were featured in the top ten on Digg, and on the front page of Reddit, where they received over 350,000 views alone.

Site traffic for the charity website also rose by 5,900 per cent overnight. In a little under a month, the campaign generated funds almost equivalent to an entire year’s worth of donations for the SingHealth Foundation.

From a non-existent media budget for a previously unknown charity, the total value of the earned media exposure was over US$1.38 million.

TBWA Group is looking forward to extending the campaign – and the fund-raising activities – again this year, pushing creative boundaries and building on the positive awareness generated by the launch this year.