Prostate Cancer UK, the UK’s leading men’s health charity, has ambitious growth targets. A core part of this is reaching and activating thousands more men across the UK to check their risk of prostate cancer and find out what they can do about it using Prostate Cancer UK’s award-winning 30 second Risk Checker. Helping more men understand their risk is key to ending needless deaths from prostate cancer. The earlier prostate cancer is found, the easier it is to treat.
The charity had set a target of getting 1.5m men to check their risk in between March 2024 and April 2025. When we took over the account in July 2024, it was running behind so reduced the target to 1.2m men. We needed to reach a broad audience of men over the age of 40, while also targeting Black Men over the age of 40 who are at double the risk of developing the disease, as well as those living in key regions in the UK with greater health inequality which leads to later diagnosis.
Prostate Cancer UK’s previous strategy had been to run ATL brand campaign activity across TV, radio and OOH which was supported by digital risk checker conversion activity running in bursts. We undertook an incrementality analysis on the TV activity and found that while it did drive increased risk checks when the activity was live, the CPA was incredibly expensive, so this approach needed to change.
Our strategy focused on driving both efficiency and volume for Prostate Cancer UK’s Risk Checker. Our first major change was to run digital Risk Checker activity as always on across paid search and paid social, supported with bursts of TV activity.
Our search strategy across both Google and Microsoft combined brand and generic PPC to capture both high intent users familiar with the charity and broader audiences searching for information about the disease.
As Prostate Cancer UK was placed in the ‘healthcare’ category on Meta, which is deemed to be sensitive, we were met with the challenge that we could not optimise towards conversions on this channel. To get around this, we tested a link click strategy and found that there was little-to-no impact on the volume of risks checks we delivered so we knew we could continue with this strategy throughout the rest of the year. To expand reach efficiently, we used geographical targeting on Meta. To reach those men at higher risk of developing the disease, we used census data at postcode level to target areas with a higher penetration of Black Men over the age of 45 as well as those areas determined to have higher health inequality.
We aligned all our TV activity with sport to ensure that we were speaking to men while they were engaged with the media. We ran across a range of sports including football, darts, cricket, boxing, rugby and Formula 1 to reach a breadth of men. We also monitored the news for relevant breaking stories in the sports world that would drive interest in men checking their risk of the disease. Two notable events were cyclist Sir Chris Hoy’s prostate cancer diagnosis and Formula 1’s Eddie Jordan’s sad death from the disease. We made sure that Prostate Cancer UK was present in these moments when more men would be looking for information by uncapping search and social budgets. We also secured spots on Sky News and around the Formula 1 coverage the weekend after Eddie Jordan’s death as we knew that commentary was likely to discuss the F1 legend.
We surpassed Prostate Cancer UK’s revised goal of 1.2m men checking their risk, with 1,502,420 men checking their risk by March 2025. Of this total figure, 1.2m were considered high risk, including 48k Black Men, who are at twice the risk of prostate cancer. Using Prostate Cancer UK’s 30-second Risk Checker informs men about their risk of the disease, so they can choose whether to speak to their GP about having a PSA blood test to check for prostate cancer. Being empowered with this information can save lives.
