Hyper-local targeting to raise awareness of bowel cancer symptoms

Bowel cancer is preventable, treatable and curable, and yet it takes 16,800 lives every year, making it the UK’s second biggest cancer killer. A lack of awareness of the symptoms (and the need to act swiftly on them) means that people are often slow to seek help, and half of people are diagnosed at the later stages (stage 3 and 4).

Bowel Cancer UK tasked Yonder Media to help with getting people to recognise the symptoms of bowel cancer – and go to their GP to get checked out, which would save lives.  

Using NHS data on the uptake of screening for bowel cancer we identified a number of priority groups – embarrassment, scepticism around healthcare provision and a stoicism were key barriers to arranging a GP visit, particularly an issue for certain ethnic groups including South Asian and Afro Caribbean communities. Our campaign needed to cut through with these communities, communicate clearly the range of symptoms they needed to look out for, and encourage a GP visit. 

We built highly customised media campaigns across these communities – local radio, local publishers and small format OOH were the bedrock of our campaign, leveraging the high trust these media engender with their local community and ensuring we connected with our hard-to-reach audiences. Online we targeted spaces where people researched and discussed symptoms and built a sophisticated keyword-based and semantic targeting campaign in online display. 

The strategy paid off, with our campaign successfully connecting with our audience with 61% recalling the campaign and 77% agreeing that the ad campaign ‘speaks to someone like me’. We increased awareness of the symptoms and crucially our campaign changed people’s attitudes and behaviours towards seeing their GP: monthly searches for ‘signs of bowel cancer’ went up by 315% and searches for ‘change in bowel habits’ went from 2000 in May to over 150,000 in September 2024.