Boob Hijack
Issue 20 | September 2011
Agency
Archibald Ingall Stretton
Creative Team
Creatives: Paul Person, Laila Milborrow
Other Credits
Rishi Dastidar, Darren Rackham, Liz Barnsdale, Natalie Powell, Steve Stretton
Date
October 2010
Background
CoppaFeel! is a breast cancer charity set up by 23-year-old cancer sufferer, Kris Hallenga.
The challenge was to raise awareness that breast cancer doesn’t discriminate against age, and get the message across to young women, fast. All on a budget of £10k.
There are so many ‘cancer’ messages in the market there was a real danger they would smother the message unless the approach was very different.
So, instead of targeting young women, young male partners were targeted instead, shocking them out of thinking complacently “it would never happen to my girlfriend”.
Idea
X-Factor voiceover Peter Dickson called a live, televised sex line and asked the
‘well-equipped’ model provocative questions about examining her breasts.
The film that resulted from this exchange was uploaded onto Vimeo and e-mailed to 50,000 male students, who were invited to blog and tweet about it.
The film was supported offline with a Boob Hijack pack that allowed CoppaFeel!’s own Boob-Team student volunteers the chance to place a sticker on any and every pair of boobs they saw.
The execution was ‘bang on’ for the testosterone-fuelled audience and helped define the ambitious and disruptive nature of the CoppaFeel! brand.
Results
The live hijack viral had over 300,000 viewers in its first week and was picked up on hundreds of blogs across the world. This saw a 75% increase in website visits compared to the rest of October.
With the smallest of budgets (£10K) the campaign created over £1.5 million of media coverage in October (ROI 150/1). And over 2.5 million people heard about the CoppaFeel! message through the campaign (ROI 250/1).
More importantly of course, it might have save lives.
Our Thoughts
Most marketers, when they ask for a viral don’t want anything of the sort. They want a cheap commercial. I suspect the remarkable young woman who started up Coppafeel! wouldn’t have minded stirring up controversy one little bit.
The sex is entirely relevant here; the creative approach is branded; and the whole is memorable. That’s three cherries in a row and the jackpot.
That said, the important part of this was the e-mail component, getting 50,000 red-blooded males to look at the video and pass it on.