Many people who live with cancer experience appetite loss, taste changes, a sore mouth and difficulty swallowing due to symptoms of cancer and side effects of treatments. These difficulties can impact daily eating habits, nutritional intake and valuable time spent with loved ones.

Boehringer Ingelheim wanted to demonstrate their commitment to people with cancer beyond the provision of therapies by providing the community with something of personal value. We wanted to bring back enjoyment, nourishment and normality into the lives of people living with cancer by helping them renew their love of eating.

As part of this objective, we also set out to build relationships with oncology patient groups so that we could provide ongoing, insights-based solutions.

Food is more than just nutrition, it brings emotional fulfilment to everyday life. People living with cancer don’t deserve to have this much needed enjoyment and nourishment stolen from them. Eating isn’t just vital to survival; it’s vital to feeling alive.

We believe that with the right recipes and the right nutritional advice, we can empower people with cancer to help them feel like themselves again. We want them to find comfort in food, experience excitement around eating with friends and family, and feel nourished at a time when their body needs it most.

Our target audience was wide: anyone with cancer, their family, friends and carers. We took the median age for a person being diagnosed with cancer, 66 years, and utilised our knowledge that that 62% of those over 50 years old use Facebook. We gathered insights from oncology patient groups to inform our recipe development and campaign roll out, and it was confirmed that Facebook was a key communications channel for members.

Research showed it’s difficult to find reliable nutritional information online, so we used social media in order to reach our audience consistently and allow easy sharing.

We targeted across Facebook and Instagram, creating audience segments defined by interest in both health/nutrition and cancer. Initial audience size was approximately 3M unique users. Instagram was used as a secondary channel to capitalise on the trend of mouth-watering food content. Across both platforms we targeted the same audience and leveraged different features.

We partnered with three experts to develop 14 recipes and provide advice on how to manage common symptoms - a television chef who has survived cancer, an oncology dietician, and a person with cancer. We approached a renowned food photographer to create appetising imagery to stand out on online.

We launched with teaser videos on Boehringer Ingelheim’s global Facebook and Instagram profiles, followed by a live social broadcast in which our experts cooked, discussed symptoms, and provided practical advice. This show also included a Q&A session. All recipes were designed as downloadable recipe cards that were housed on a campaign webpage that social media linked to.

The initiative was to run for a year, focusing on a different monthly recipe. We utilised Instagram Stories and continuously interacted with our audience. We created instructional time-lapse videos of each recipe to display the simplicity at which they could be created at home.

The teasers and kick-off live broadcast were watched by over 780,000 people vs. our target of 500,000. Since launch in August 2018, over 4 million people have engaged with the campaign on social channels vs. our target of 600,000, and this is still growing.

We have been inundated by engagement online with overwhelmingly encouraging feedback, demonstrating the positive impact of the campaign on people’s lives.

We received 20,730 campaign link-clicks from launch to end of December vs. our target of 14,000. And we’ve had participation from 8 cancer patient organisations in 8 countries vs. our target of 5 organisations.

The campaign was initially set to run for a year, however this is being lengthened to become an ongoing outreach and support initiative for people living with cancer. We are currently planning further live cooking broadcasts and recipe collaborations, looking to extend the campaign beyond the realms of social media.