Every Oct. 19th the entire world celebrates the International Breast Cancer Day, a date when the topic traditionally enters press and media agenda and opens a 24-hour window of spotlight and conversation over the cause. But, as the numbers of postponed checkups statistics show, just one day a year of awareness is clearly not enough.

LALCEC is one of the most well-known and prestigious Argentinean NGO´s in the fight against cancer, so for this important date, they had clear objectives for their 2022 campaign:

- Make the most of the one day of media attention the topic gets in the year.

- Install and raise awareness about the need to have the annual mammogram done.

- Raise the number of actual mammograms done during the campaign vs previous years.

What happens if this Oct 19th when all press rooms in the country call the NGO´s to talk about breast cancer, they all respond: I´m sorry but it´s not today, we have postponed it for tomorrow.

That´s exactly what we did.

LALCEC invited to convene the main 30 fighting cancer NGOs across Argentina and instead of doing each their usual campaign for the day, they joined forces to postpone the International Breast Cancer Day owning the media agenda of the event during two weeks.

PR is at the core of the idea, and media relationships were key to making it exist altogether and to gain momentum. It has no other medium, no spot, no print, no paid outlets. Just the same piece of news released day after day, for 14 days in a row persuading the main journalists and anchors of the nation to become organic ambassadors of the cause and to tell our story again and again and strategically, never letting the 24-hour window of attention to close.

For the first time in history, LALCEC invited to convene the main 30 fighting cancer NGOs across Argentina and instead of doing each their usual campaign for the day, they joined forces for something way more powerful: agree on casting the exact same message to media, with a joint press release and the same social media post, declaring that this Oct 19th, Breast Cancer Day was postponed for tomorrow.

The next day the exact same thing happened; a new joint released communicating that Breast Cancer Day had been postponed was issued.

And they kept postponing the day for 14 days in a row.

The first and strongest reaction was: How is it even possible to postpone such an important thing? Exactly our point.

Also, the joint force of the 30 NGO´s convinced private health providers to join the campaign donating thousands of free mammograms for people with no health coverage.

Turning one day a year of awareness into 14, we obtained:

- 260% increase in PR coverage vs benchmark. Meaning that our campaign almost tripled the attention any other Breast Cancer campaign ever got before. (VAP $6.137.520)

- 270% increase reach vs benchmark. Meaning that 270% more people received the message in comparison to any previous Breast Cancer Day campaign ever.

(40.678.846 PR organic and social media contacts).

- 300% increase in mammograms appointments and breast checkups completed during “Pink Season” (Oct., Nov. and Dec.) in comparison to same season 2021 (7.213 appointments).

And in the long run, we managed to put the finger on the dangerous tendency of postponing mammograms and checkups and start reversing them with new health habits incorporated into the lives of Argentine women in pursuit of early detection and therefore, saving precious lives.