Fight Cancer marketing stunt “Love Life, Fight Cancer”

When promoting your business or campaign, how do you ensure your ad is seen more than 100.000 times on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or other social media? Especially when there is only a small budget (or even no budget)? 

The Fight Cancer Foundation certainly knew how to get attention in the recent months by manipulating social media to anounce their new “Love Life, Fight Cancer”-campaign by taking advantage of the success of the social networking sites. They must have thought: when there is no budget to launch the clip on national television, then we have to be creative by using YouTube, a free social media website, were we can broadcast our ads gratuitous.

They introduced their “Love Life, Fight Cancer”-advertisement on YouTube (the one minute video is attached to this blog, you can find the video below) and if they succeeded to get over 100.000 views, Dutch television channel SBS was prepared to broadcast Fight Cancer’s campaign on World Cancer Day for free.

Directly, Fight Cancer putted the public relations mill in motion to ensure the 100.000 views. The bet with SBS was on. Still, nowadays it is hard to lure 100.000 unique viewers to your page, because there is many information on the internet. It is hard to spread the message and also to get the attention of the viewers who needs to be prepared to visit your website.

According to public agency The Gardeners (who did the publicity of this campaign) Dutch digital newspapers such as telegraaf.nl and NRCnext.nl and also magazines were contacted to write something about the campaign. They wrote about the unique way of campaigning “Love Life, Fight Cancer” and the bet that was involved.

The next step was sending messages on Twitter and Facebook, to make the target group aware of the one minute video made by the Fight Cancer Foundation. This because twitter can make a significant contribution to a rapid buil-up area and its snowball effect would get activated. Tweets and retweets were rapidly distributed across the Netherlands. Dutch celebrities, like Georgina Verbaan, Sylvie van der Vaart and Jeroen van Koningsbrugge, also replied about the campaign on Twitter to watch the video on YouTube and finally the Dutch TV-show De Wereld Draait Door gave attention to this ad. It sounds like enough publicity to me to win the bet....

You probably all want to know if they goal of 100.000 views was reached in time. Unfortunately they didn’t, within an inch. But the fact is that the Fight Cancer Foundation  generated an enormous amount of publicity with this campaign. Although Fight Cancer didn't had 100.000 viewers, they still won the price because the Dutch television channel SBS was willing to broadcast the commercial on prime time for free to reward the thousands of people who supported this campaign.