Lung cancer has a stigma. It kills more Americans than the next three most deadly cancers combined. But where are the ribbons? The mustaches? There’s little support because most people think people with lung cancer caused it themselves.

Our challenge was to bring the stigma, and the accompanying discrimination, to light. We used an integrated approach, grounded in out-of-home, to make people question one of their most private beliefs: that people deserve to die.

A teaser campaign in 32 cities suggested that characters, each with their own unique hatred (Cat Lovers, The Tattooed, Hipsters, Crazy Old Aunts and The Genetically Privileged), deserved to die. Installations were torn down, TV stations covered the postings, images were shared, people “wept in the streets” (quote from a social post). Then add cinema, guerrilla wallscapes, a Facebook app and you have a conversation storm about lung cancer that swept a nation.

Phone kiosks, bus shelters and wild postings for the teaser portion of the campaign ran with no organization identification for approximately a week in 32 cities. The result was expected: people tore them down, television stations covered the mystery, photos were shared and bloggers blogged. If anyone Googled “deserve to die,” they were directed to a teaser page (NoOneDeservesToDie.org) with a countdown when a killer would be revealed.

After a week we replaced the out-of-home image with copy and Lung Cancer Alliance identification. We added cinema, video projection, online display, search and social to fuel an earned media frenzy.

Post-reveal NoOneDeservesToDie.org became an interactive educational site. Socially, a Facebook application randomized friends to get lung cancer (about 12 of the average user’s 172), of which only two would survive.

Our PR generated coverage from 140 outlets including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Salon, and CNN.

Paid campaign, June 25th to July 29, 2012 in 32 cities:

+ Second most popular story on Yahoo! June 26-28, 2012

+ 154,000 visitors and 1,200 active visitors on the campaign website

+ Yahoo! story had 5,571 comments and more than 2,100 mentions in social channels, blogs, forums and news sites

+ 70% of all conversation positive; 97% positive or neutral

+ 4,000,000+ PR impressions via broadcast coverage

+ Covered by 140 media outlets: NY Times, CNN, TimeNewsFeed, Salon, Luerzers, AdWeek, AdFreak, etc. 

+ Cinema spot received nearly 25,000 views on YouTube

+ Facebook community incurred a 67% growth rate 

The LCA official website doubled its ongoing daily traffic

After the paid campaign:

+ In November, lung cancer awareness month, user-generated-content of people that "didn't deserve to die" received 18,710 engaged users (270% growth), 13,730 people talking about it (490% growth), and 1,595 shares (263% growth).