Government of Ontario - Ministry of Health
Cervical Cancer Awareness

The Goal

Almost half of Ontarian women are not familiar with what they can do to prevent or reduce the risk of cervical cancer. As such, the challenge in this campaign was twofold – first, to disseminate a complex message through a variety of touch points in a personalized manner – second, to identify the key knowledge gap amongst Ontarian women as it pertains the preventative measures and steps that should be taken to reduce the risk of cervical cancer.

Insights and Strategy

The strategy employed for this campaign was fueled by the insight that cervical cancer was viewed with a stigmatic and fatalistic perspective. Ontarian women felt they could not take firm measures to prevent contraction and because cancer is synonymous with death, it was a stigmatized subject our demographic was less than willing to openly discuss. As such, PHD honed in on the knowledge gap specific to preventative measures surrounding cervical cancer, namely that Ontarian women were not aware that Cervical Cancer is almost entirely preventable! In response to this insight PHD developed a campaign that used first to market, never been done before tactics to foster conversation and destigmatize cervical cancer while eliminating knowledge gaps, and encouraging women to take the necessary steps in terms of appropriate preventative measures.


The Plan

The campaign utilized the tried, tested, and true media tactics that are a staple of any well rounded marketing strategy to create base level of awareness amongst the target demographic. The campaign was then complimented by two highly unique digital executions, one of which being a first to the Canadian market place. PHD partnered with #PAID sourcing popular Ontario based influencers to share their own personal stories on cervical cancer preventative measures – ranging from humorous to heartfelt – as a means of delivering the brand’s message in a personalized manner that encouraged dialogue. Influencers then leveraged the newly introduced Instagram polling feature as a means of communicating with their respective followings, identifying knowledge gaps on the preventative measures, while creating an opportunity for stigma free dialogue. This was done by having influencers pose true or false questions within their Instagram stories to their followers to gauge their level of understanding in terms of preventative measures. The influencers would then answer the question in their subsequent Instagram story based on the number of correct or incorrect responses, and in doing so created a conversational destigmatizing marketing experience that responded to, directly addressed, and was informed by the outcome of the IG polls in real time. Above and beyond the #PAID influencer execution, PHD collaborated with Slimcut to develop short digestible pieces of editorial content that were seeded within social networks by brand names that are a go to and trusted source of timely information. By leveraging the brand equity of household names such as Now Magazine, Toronto Life, and Canadian Family the campaign was able to make this message more pertinent, timely, and relevant than ever before.

The Results

The campaign delivered overwhelmingly positive traditional digital metrics and unique insights. The #PAID Influencer component delivering 190,000 engagements – well above the estimated 60,000. Of equal importance was the caliber of engagement – Ontarian women cheered on their favourite influencers for taking to a social platform to discuss and destigmatize what for many is not a public topic of conversation – and with positive and neutral sentiment coming in at the 99% plus mark the value of partnering with influencers to disseminate a personalized message was truly felt. The use of the IG poll feature – something which had not yet been done by a brand in Canada delivered view counts as high as 88,000 per individual story with an overall story views coming in above 170K, a total of approximately 10,000 votes with one individual poll stories receiving in excess of 1,900 votes. The Slimcut editorial component drove phenomenal engagement – with average article engagement time averaging just under five minutes and one embedded article driving an average time spent as high as 16 minutes. These results truly underscore the value of leveraging brand equity as a means of creating and disseminating content within social platforms. In sum – this campaign utilized a personal, conversational, and highly contemporary approach to reach Ontarian women and address knowledge gaps on preventative measures while destigmatizing conversation around cervical cancer.