The Movember Foundation:
#FOMOVEMBER
Movember is a charity with great awareness and a decade of fundraising success for men’s mental health and cancer. This is largely thanks to its brilliantly simple mantra: grow a mo to save a bro.
But after a decade of growth participation rates were down, and – unless we could do something about it – the Movember movement was in danger of losing relevance.
“Suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 50.”
Insight
The Movember Foundation’s chief mission is to stop men dying too young. In most cases this means suicide.
To take on this challenge we needed to understand it. We delved deep into the data – both from existing source material and by conducting additional research with Keller Fay Talk Tracker – to understand what common factors stop men from seeking help when suicidal or depressed.
And the answer was simple. Men are afraid to talk about their problems, their relationships, or in fact anything meaningful. That’s why in many heartbreaking interviews with families that have lost a young man to suicide, the common refrain was: ‘we had no idea anything was wrong… if only he had talked to us.’
Our strategy was simple, then: show men that speaking up, while painful and difficult, was far less damaging than the fear of missing out on life.
And so #FOMOvember was born.
A whopping 350 pieces of content created over 45 days across The Times & The Sunday Times, The Sun, Talk Sport and Sky via video, social, digital, print, events, and broadcast media.
The work
One of the highlights was a video we created about a young man who dreams of becoming a better goalkeeper – which he achieves thanks to the soul of David Seaman’s famous ‘tache. Yes, really.
Our partnership with Sky saw a number of discussions about mental health across Sky Sports HD and VOD services.
Plus lots of banter – that was more heartfelt than usual, with a lot less of the ‘laddishness’ – from presenters on Sky Sports.
We partnered with Storyful to seed beautiful, funny, and downright weird social moments on media platforms including Snapchat (like this creepy image, above) – contributing to tens of millions of views across the campaign.
Sky Sports invited some of the sporting greats across the punditsphere to talk about mental health, with the usual jokes. We love this picture mainly because of the brilliant ‘side-eye’ from our man on the far left.
Finally we doorstepped many a celebrity on the red carpet to share the same message on social media: ‘grow a mo and save a bro’.
Celebrity clips caught at the BBC Radio 1 Teen Awards, Pride of Britain Awards and the Brits was shared across The Times & The Sunday Times, The Sun, and Talk Sport.
And we staged a national ‘deadline day’ shave-off with celebrities and (sometimes) willing volunteers getting their chins nice and smooth. We even opened up a free pop up barbers in London which shaved over 160 people in one day, for free.
We created a series of videos on Sky TV, Sunday magazine and newspaper supplements and a free pop-up barbershop in the centre of London – to encourage men to talk more about their feelings and prepare for Movember.
All our content was geared towards FOMO – the fear of missing out on life by not sharing your problems.
The campaign generated over 51 million views, including 11.3 million video views with a combined completion rate of 47.53%. After the campaign our research saw a 48% uplift in respondents agreeing that ‘Movember funded important education programs to reduce preventable deaths among men’.
“The content strategy was a real game-changer for us – the success of this campaign will make such a huge difference to thousands of young men in the UK.
