Introducing Testi-Monials: Some of the hairiest, wrinkliest ambassadors around, sharing their own stories of cancer survival, the benefits of early detection and challenging guys to #havetheballs to talk about this issue.

The campaign went live on the 8th February, using YouTube viral videos, Tweets, media and our hashtag #havetheballs. We slowly started to push our target market to our Microsite, and kept them interested.

Our hairy characters also did some celebrity shout-outs, which we sent to their Social Media pages to get reactions.

As we knew the majority of South Africans would come from their mobile phones, we kept the Microsite very simple, prompting guys to scroll through all the questions without using too much data (very precious in South Africa). And so far, question 14 (what is the survival rate of TC) has the most views.

We hope that as word spreads, more men will feel comfortable enough to have the balls to not only talk about their balls, but perform self-examinations too.

The campaign garnered over R1million in earned media within the first week and was featured on national TV and various radio stations.

With our media budget of only R30000 (€1833) we opted for direct response ad formats on performance-orientated channels, reaching +500000 unique users in a space of 7 days. And lucky for us, they shared it, which means we got organic reach too.

Every month site users increase by 33%, which means guys are warming up to our balls, and now are not going through only one or two questions, but almost all of them.

Our campaign even got translated into French and Spanish for the Canadian and Colombian markets, and was featured as far afield as New Zealand.

Although we’ll never know how many men were inspired by this campaign to start talking about TC, if it led to even one early detection, it would’ve been a success.