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 Tweet sent from their Twitter 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 and display – 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, digital billboards across the capital were 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 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 social reach of 108 million impressions. As the campaign climaxed, #BiggerIssues trended across the country. For one day everyone was 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 historic breakthrough, made possible by a powerful call-to-action executed through impossible-to-ignore dynamic digital environments.

To determine the volume of conversation around a topic, the team inputted groups of keywords into social listening tools, before comparing the results with those of keywords around male suicide. This process was conducted around the clock for each of the 150+ published executions.

This creative use of real time social listening allowed the campaign to grab people’s attention with topics we knew they were talking about in any given moment. This was a ‘way in’ to engaging them in a topic they’re not talking about: male suicide.

The highly reactive approach was designed to capture the interest of young men who are often turned off by ‘traditional’ cause messaging. By drawing our audience in with a highly topical pop culture reference and juxtaposing it with male suicide, the campaign was able to convey the scale of the issue in a way that made guys sit up and take notice.

In the UK, 80% of people who kill themselves are men. Suicide is now the single biggest killer of young guys in the UK. But few people know that fact. Even fewer are talking about it.

Various cultural pressures have resulted in the UK having one of the highest male suicide rates in the world. Guys are told to ‘man-up’ when faced with an issue, rather than talk about it.

Despite the alarming statistics, the issue had never been debated in Parliament. And it certainly isn’t talked about on the streets. This issue will continue unabated until we start talking about the scale of the problem openly.

Male grooming brand Lynx (Axe) partnered with UK charity CALM to develop the #BiggerIssues campaign, with the objective of increasing awareness of the fact that suicide is the biggest killer of young British men.