TBWA\London

Client: Ovarian Cancer Action (OCA)
Product: Charity
Title: #FollowedByCancer
Media: Social
Country: United Kingdom
Date Of Campaign: 8th May 2022

Background: In 2023, only 30% of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer will live beyond 10 years. It’s vital we make faster progress to reach a vision of ovarian cancer being more survivable. Ovarian Cancer Action (OCA) is a charity based in the UK striving to make that a reality. Their brief to us - to raise awareness with a “noisy” disease, symptom, risk and prevention campaign.Our response had one key insight at the heart of it - despite survival rates increasing up to 90% for those diagnosed with stage one ovarian cancer, 90% of women don’t know the four main symptoms of the disease.

Idea: One woman dies from ovarian cancer every two hours. Yet despite this, 90% of women don’t know the four main symptoms of ovarian cancer.Symptoms so common, they often get dismissed or are experienced without people realising. The idea was simple. Like in real life, the symptoms began following women without them noticing. However this time, it was on Twitter, and ignoring them wasn’t a matter of life and death. Despite tweeting regularly, the accounts were mostly ignored.It was vital to showcase what we've been up to and to make sure people saw and understood the campaign. So, we created our big reveal film just before World Ovarian Cancer Day, to own the conversation before, during and after for maximum impact. A few days after the reveal, we retargeted our audience to prompt them to follow the main account and reinforce awareness around the symptoms.

Results: Not only did a significantly large audience see the reveal, but they also took action to spread the word further whilst committing to raise long term awareness by following, interacting and engaging with OCA’s official account. The reveal generated 5.5m views (one view for every six women in the UK), and amassed 246k tweet interactions, making it OCA’s ‘Most Liked and Retweeted Tweet’ of all time. In a testament to the impact of the campaign, and people’s commitment to continue to stay informed, there was a 50% increase in follower count after the campaign launched, and @OvarianCancerUK received as many mentions across the 4-day campaign as it did for the whole of 2021.