Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards - 2023

Campaign: Wall Street Balls
Agency/Firm: McCann Health Dubai, an IPG Health Company
Client: Testicular Cancer Society

One in 250 men will develop testicular cancer, but not enough are doing regular self-checkups for early detection and treatment.

That was the impetus for the Testicular Cancer Society’s “Wall Street Balls” campaign, in which the nonprofit cleverly and cost-efficiently broke the stigma around discussing testicular cancer by spotlighting the Wall Street Bull, who thanks to a plethora of New York City tourism, has its balls checked out by thousands of people every day.

The Cincinnati-based nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of testicular cancer said it partnered with ad agency McCann Health Dubai to drum up social posts around “the most checked balls on earth,” with the goal of turning comments into lifesaving reminders.

For its effort, the Testicular Cancer Society won bronze for Tiny But Mighty among advocacy groups in the Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards 2023.

It used text mining and image recognition tools to track every social media post featuring the Wall Street Bull’s balls and deployed a content team to identify engagement opportunities in multiple languages. The nonprofit and agency used generative AI to test copy and help deliver 21,000 individual comments.

They also identified the top reasons people posted about the Wall Street Bull’s balls: “Career, luck and a tourist ‘must-do.’ Tonally, it was obvious the posts were generally lighthearted, and our campaign was to match that,” the nonprofit said.

The nonprofit said the campaign leveraged social media and PR to generate $110,000 in earned media with no media spend. In one month, the campaign reached more than 2 million people across 21 countries, achieving 6 million impressions on social media, according to the society.