Half the world’s population will be diagnosed with cancer, and many will never tell their bosses for fear of retaliation. To remove this stigma, we didn’t need just one partner, we needed hundreds. We didn’t just need initial support, we needed ongoing commitment. We needed a new social contract between organizations and their employees working with cancer. We created unavoidable moments where marketers would see their community – and their competition – acknowledge support. What started with $100MM in donated media quickly generated 390 signed pledges and over 294.5M in earned impressions in only four months.

When Publicis Groupe CEO, Arthur Sadoun, received his cancer diagnosis last year and publicly shared the news he received an outpouring of stories and support. He learned first hand that, in addition to being scared for their health, cancer patients were too often scared for their jobs, and felt the need to hide their illness. This was the impetus of this program.

Too many people feel uncomfortable reaching out for help within their place of work and many leaders are unaware of the resources that exist for aid. We had to take a big initiative to start reducing this fear, which is why we wanted a campaign that would remove the stigma of cancer at work and stand with every employee dealing with the disease through concrete action.

Creative was grounded in the sobering statistic that 50% of all people who are diagnosed with cancer are afraid to tell their employer. Why would they do that? Because they fear for the safety of their jobs, the security of their healthcare and the impact on their career path. The overarching goal of all creative work was to drive awareness for CEOs and business leaders that this is an emotional topic that is affecting their employees.

The visual approach was driven by the 50% statistic - print and OOH showed a face split apart by the statistic. Film leaned into the isolation that cancer patients may feel, going about their workdays while secretly struggling beneath the surface.

Led by our thought-provoking stat that 50% of people will have cancer in their lifetimes, we used a two-pronged approach. First, we recruited credible partners including leading cancer institutions and founding company pledge partners for our business community targeted launch in the US, UK and France. Secondly, we launched a campaign to build awareness and provoke action. #workingwithcancer is a campaign calling companies to make public pledges to fight cancer and its stigmas in the workplace.

We focused on reaching the leadership of the world’s largest companies in order to make the biggest real-world impact. We knew that advocacy could come from anywhere within an organization; whereas approval would need to come at the top. We targeted leadership via specific comms to open their aperture; and also created mass awareness to spur conversations in the workplace and advocate with leadership.

With the global business community’s eyes on Davos, we built a top-down approach to make sure our pledge would be an embedded reality of their world. Paid media timed to the event targeted C-Suite newspaper, business site homepage takeovers and premium placements the week of Jan 16, 2023. Phase one also included donated B2B media to feature the “Work/Life” film (TV in the U.S.) and C-suite targeted OLV and OLA assets globally.

Phase two launched on January 31, timed to World Cancer Day (Feb 4) and Super Bowl (Feb 12), to go in a bottoms-up direction. Mass targeted messaging drove awareness to encourage a more supportive workplace leading to better recovery. $100M in donated media helped get the word out across Cinema, Print, Video, Social, Digital, Audio, and OOH – including prime Times Square placements – with earned messaging from celebrity/influencers driving conversation.

Our 390 pledge signees include Fortune 100 companies, all of whom have committed to ending the stigma of working with cancer. These 390 pledgees represent, in total, over 13M employees who will be impacted by this work. Additionally, across earned media, the campaign garnered over 295.4MM impressions, including being covered in Forbes, CNN and Fortune, and on the social front, our #workingwithcancer hashtag received more than 16.5MM potential impressions.

Coming off of this first campaign phase, Publicis has appointed a project lead and intends to continue recruiting pledge sign ups, provide a list of actions and resources for pledge signees, and working to reduce the stigma for a mass audience with further campaign phases. Via this committed resource and continued industry and corporate support, we believe we can reduce fear, reverse stigma, and ultimately improve the health outcomes of those who are #workingwithcancer.

We were moved to action by the outpouring of stories, support, and camaraderie that Arthur Sadoun experienced during his own battle with cancer inspired him to create greater awareness and drive a global impact.

But to make a real-change in the world we needed to think about how to make the biggest impact. In the words of Carla Serrano, Publicis Chief Strategy Officer, “We really want to model from the top, but we also want to encourage smaller businesses to sign up. This is about achieving social change to normalize this issue so that the statistics [about the fear of telling your employer] goes down.”