The Campaign

Speaking to parents whose children had been infected gave us a clear insight. Despite their horrific experiences, parents came across not as victims, but as survivors. They were strong, defiant and anxious to help others and felt that a lack of knowledge had been responsible for their child’s illness. If only they’d known what they NOW KNOW the disease could have been avoided. We decided to champion these stories and created the ‘ I NOW KNOW ’ campaign to tell the real life stories of four children affected by the disease in order to educate Australians of the remaining risks.

Creative Execution

We started by prepping doctors to guide discussions with parents providing information in digital and print medical publications. Next we ignited the conversation in hospitals by targeting 120,000 new mums within just 48 hours of childbirth with kits including critical information and urging them to speak to their doctor. 1,000 influencer mums further amplified the conversation sharing personal posts rallying more than 200,000 across their combined networks to spread the word on social channels. We integrated our stories into articles and podcasts across key parenting sites online, and dark social was optimised over a period of six months to intercept moments when parents and grandparents discussed their children on social messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger. Parents were encouraged to share the emotive stories of those affected, while grandparents were served content direct from a doctor to enlist them as educational vessels.

Our campaign sparked conversation about Meningococcal across Australia. The likelihood to have talked about the disease among family, friends and other parents tripled resulting in a dramatic increase in parents searching for information online and asking a doctor or nurse about it. Through sparking conversations we also educated Australians on the multiple strains of the disease achieving a +22% increase in awareness of the different Meningococcal strains. But most importantly, we successfully lowered the number of Australian children at risk of this dangerous disease. The likelihood of parents having their children vaccinated doubled as a result of the campaign.

It wasn’t enough to simply tell people about Meningococcal Disease, instead we needed to get people actively talking about it in the right moments. Our media strategy was fundamental for how we activated this campaign, identifying multiple targets beyond the creative idea, and leveraging multiple channels with a keen focus on driving earned reach by targeting moments of conversation.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

It was crucial we made the biggest impact among parents of children under the age of two. But when it comes to their child’s health, we recognised parents were far more likely to take advice from those closest to them. This meant that targeting parents alone wasn’t enough. Instead, we needed to spark conversation among three influential groups: ? Parents; ? Grandparents; and ? local doctors. With this in mind we set out to get each of these groups talking with each other about Meningococcal, in order to get the disease back into the nation’s consciousness. Not only did media need to identify and reach these different audiences, but it needed to target moments when they were most engaged in discussions surrounding a child.