Covid-19 has led to a breast cancer screening crisis, with a significant backlog of patients in some countries and pressure on a system already under strain.  Following a drop in virus infection rates, there was strong national commitment to get screening programmes back up and running by October 2020.  Our challenge was to quickly build confidence amongst women to attend, recognising that time is of the essence when it comes to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

We had a vital message to deliver to women so our strategy was to drive awareness and a clear call to action using simple public health-based messaging to press the importance of timely screening, without evoking fear.  The messages were targeted and delivered via Facebook to encourage social sharing with each post linking to a landing page where women could learn more about breast screening and what to expect when they attend an appointment.   To engage clinicians, the message was tailored to recognise and thank them for their on-going commitment to support breast screening during this difficult time, delivered via LinkedIn.

Our ‘It’s Time’ creative centred around clocks, with alarm bells designed to represent breasts. It was a bold and eye-catching way to bring to life the key message via static and animated posts. The campaign and landing page was run on Facebook across Spain, Germany and the UK, with all content translated for each market and tailored to our target audience of women 50-70 who are eligible for breast screening.

The Facebook campaign succeeded in generating large-scale engagement in every market.  Over 700 comments were left on the posts, with women coming forward to share their own personal cancer stories and encouragement to get screened.  With a modest paid social media budget, the 4-week campaign delivered 4.5m impressions, 536k engagements, nearly 5k reactions, 51.5k clicks to landing page and 1.2m video views.  It became the most successful direct to consumer campaign that Hologic has run in EMEA.

The professional campaign far outperformed LinkedIn’s engagement rate benchmark of 0.64% with an average rate of 2.02%, achieving 175k impressions, 3.5k engagements and 21.7k video views.