Results and Effectiveness

Our ads were on every major advertising and design site within 24 hours, and websites as varied as USAToday.com, FFFFound, and over 12,000 Tumblr blogs. They made the top ten on Digg, and the front page of Reddit, where they received over 350,000 views alone. On Twitter, the work was mentioned every few seconds for over a week, with traffic for our charity website rising 5,900% overnight. In four weeks, the campaign generated funds almost equivalent to an entire year’s worth of donations. Without a media budget, for an unknown charity, the value of the media earned was over $1,380,000.

Creative Execution

We used the faces of famous mustachioed men from throughout history, and showed how much difference a moustache made to their persona, and our perception of them. This tied in well with the idea that growing a moustache in the month of Movember would make a huge difference to the lives of men suffering from health issues such as prostate cancer. These faces, and the art direction that made them so visually arresting, were carried through the campaign, and made all of our communications unique and immediately recognisable.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

We couldn’t afford media space for our ads, so we needed to find a different way to spark the conversation. So we showed the ads to the most critical people on the Internet: ourselves. We uploaded them to AdsOfTheWorld.com, where Internet Experts dissect creative ads, and waited. The ads become a hot topic of discussion, and were quickly featured on literally thousands of blogs. To channel this exposure, our ads led the viewer to our campaign charity website, where people could make donations, become fans on Facebook, apply digital moustaches to their own photos, and chat with other fans.