The campaign used social listening to fuel a reactive campaign that highlighted all the trivial things we are more than happy to talk about, and the one thing we are not.

From new emojis to cat memes, trendy superfoods to trending Christmas ads, #BiggerIssues held a mirror up to all the real-life, real-time things that our live social data showed were dominating guys’ conversations. Topics that were statistically ‘bigger’ than suicide.

The campaign used this provocative messaging as a platform to encourage people to perform a simple social action – signing up to have an automated message sent from their Twitter or Facebook profile. In doing so, they would be helping to get male suicide talked about more than any of those trivial topics.

Live social listening powered a national campaign spanning social, online banners and digital billboards – with creative executions drawing upon whatever inane subject was monopolising newsfeeds at any given moment.

To really dramatize the scale of the problem – and reflect the rate guys currently take their own lives in the UK – we created new headlines every 2 hours, 24 hours a day, for the duration of the campaign.

Creative was also regionally tailored, based on social data insight. So when fog descended on London, creative served across the capital was updated in real-time to reflect the local online chatter about the weather. Or when a 90s rock band announcing their come-back gig created a lot of social buzz in Manchester, the creative served in that area was immediately updated accordingly. The result was hyper-relevant, timely versions of the ads all around the country.

The data-driven campaign did more to raise awareness of the issue than anything in the last ten years. According to YouGov, knowledge of male suicide increased by 45% nationally over the campaign period, and by 120% in London.

There were 20,000 online mentions of #BiggerIssues, with a potential social reach of 108 million impressions. As the campaign climaxed, #BiggerIssues trended across the country. For one day we got everyone talking about this bigger issue.

The number of men feeling confident enough to come forward and talk about their problems increased drastically (over 5,600 helpline calls in the campaign period alone).

Finally, the exposure that #BiggerIssues gave the issue resulted in male suicide being debated in Parliament for the first time. This was a truly historic breakthrough, made possible by innovative use of social listening to re-frame the issue.

'I’ve seen nothing as big, as popular and as far reaching as this in my 10 years of running CALM. I am immensely proud of this campaign’. – Jane Powell C.E.O CALM