The bad news is that 1 in 250 men will develop testicular cancer.

But the good news is that if detected early, survival rates are 99%.

The Testicular Cancer society is an awareness center in the business of saving men from the most common form of cancer amongst those aged 15-35 through prevention. One of their main challenges is getting as many men as possible to give their balls a monthly once-over. However, stoicism and virility norms make seeking help about "down there" a challenge.

We aimed to change that, but we couldn't afford the necessary media spend to tell everyone to self-check. In fact, we didn't have money to spend on media at all and since no one likes to talk about cancer, we embraced a more familiar language: jokes. Men forget to check their family jewels, but they never miss an opportunity to joke about them. Leveraging humor's bonding power, we turned a sensitive topic into a relatable conversation made viral by a famous bronze statue: The Wall Street Charging Bull had people lining everyday to rub its balls, and more than 70,000 mentions on instagram alone. Since thousands of images of the Wall Street Bull’s balls appear online every day from across the world, we took the opportunity to turn each into a self- check ad.

"Admiring the bull's bronze? Don't forget your own silver pair!" "Rubbing for luck? Checking yourself is luckier!"

For a month, we turned social media comments into lighthearted, lifesaving reminders in 3 simple steps.

- Step 1: Tracking the posts

We established thousands of data points across the world online every day for a month and were able to reach thousands of users directly. Using text mining and image recognition we tracked every post on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter featuring the famous Wall Street Bull’s balls, and set up a reactive content team to identify a point of engagement for each. In fact, we went through tens of thousands of posts in more than 20 languages, which we catalogued accordingly and also took note of what people were looking for: career success, luck or simply a tourist must-do. Having these insights helped us to curate quirky comments that could capture the users’ attention and get us some hard earned engagement.

- Step 2: Curating the copy

We created thousands of variations of witty comments in multiple languages taking into consideration the situation, gender, caption, geolocation, hashtags and any data that would give us a seamless point of engagement and effectively capture the user’s attention. We made sure to keep our copy quirky and lighthearted all throughout.

- Step 3: Agile posting

We published 25,000 of these comments to users’ posts, often in real time, reminding men to check their own balls, or for women to remind their male friends and family.