This campaign is a pure representation of a message effectively targeted to a specific audience. We talk to Dominican men to take care of "their balls" at a baseball game.

We relied on a live stunt and the distribution of hundreds of balls to the audience. We used the core element of the game (baseballs), as our vehicle for the message. These balls were specially designed with a bump that represented the main warning sign of testicular cancer. The balls also redirected to a landing page with more information about the campaign and self-examination videos with explanations made with baseballs.

The average Dominican man takes very little care of his wellbeing and general health because they think it’s a sign of weakness and lack of masculinity, making the rate of late detection of diseases, such as cancer, increase every year.

Farmacia Carol has been committed to the general health of Dominicans, but recently became interested in specifically targeting men to challenge the social stigma and popular belief that a man who cares about his health is not man enough.

Our challenge was to find a way to get the attention of this audience and make both the message and the medium relevant and hard to ignore.

To capture the attention of our target, we intervened something that for the Dominican man is almost a religion: a baseball game.

At the beginning of the game, we did a stunt with the home-plate umpire in which he discarded dozens of balls because they were not in condition to play. 10 minutes of pure confusion in which they officially announced that "the game has not started, because there are no balls", something never seen before in the history of Dominican baseball.

Halfway through the game we revealed the campaign in the stadium and digital platforms: it was a message from Farmacia Carol and Escogido Baseball Club to raise awareness about testicular cancer.

We also handed out thousands of balls with a bump, representing the most important sign of the disease. These balls redirected to a landing-page with more information about the campaign and self-examination videos explained with baseball.

We knew that to attract the attention of the Dominican men, we could not do so with traditional "disease prevention" language.

After several planning sessions, we realized that if there is one thing the Dominican man pays full attention to, it is baseball. At that moment, we realized that the message and the channel complemented each other perfectly. That's how "no balls, no game" was born. A catchy message (and with double meaning), in a baseball context, but at the same time with the undertone of prevention and care that we wanted to communicate.

Farmacia Carol served as the main promoter of this message, which had never been addressed in the communication of our market and even less in this way.

We took over a baseball play-off game, between two of the most important teams in the country.

The stunt starts at the beginning of the game. As a rule of baseball no ball can be used unless the umpire has checked them before starting the game. We delayed the game for 10 minutes do too "there were no usable balls", making the fans in the stadium, social media, commentators, sports press and the players on the field, automatically confused and annoyed with what was happening. Finally the game started.

In the 4th-inning, we intervened again but to reveal the campaign: it was all an awareness message from Farmacia Carol to promote testicular cancer care and self-examination. We also handed out baseballs with a bump that represented the main sign of the disease. The balls also redirected to a landing-page with more information about the campaign.

The acceptance rate of the message was completely positive. The match attendees claimed to have understood the message and agreed to be much more aware of the disease.

- Live stunt in a stadium with a capacity of +10k people.

- Reach: 7,036,626

- Impressions: 5,349,929

- Engagement: 427,747

All this data is extremely relevant, especially when we consider that the Dominican Republic is a country with a population of +11million.

The brand definitely seized a territory that no other local brand had had the courage to touch, becoming an ambassador of this message and achieving a stronger bond with its male audience.

The sexist culture is very latent in most Dominican men. It is very common the taboo that real men are those that nothing hurts, those who do not cry, those who are strong and tough... in short, a very "traditional" perception of what is the old concept of being a man.

With this campaign we faced the challenge of breaking with this belief that the "macho man never gets sick" so deeply rooted in everyone's mind, and tell them to take care of their health.

The best way for us was to do it through a worldwide symbol of "dominicanism" like baseball, making the message and the medium combine automatically.