In Australia, community health announcements from not-for-profit organisations are permitted. However, they must adhere to strict codes of ethics from the Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) and Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA). The focus of these self-regulating systems is to ensure the appropriate use of factual evidence to not mislead or make unsubstantiated claims.

As a supplier of a therapeutic good, Lung Foundation Australia is also governed by the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code that ensures that the marketing and advertising of therapeutic goods to consumers is conducted in a manner that promotes the quality use of therapeutic goods, is socially responsible and does not mislead or deceive the consumer.

Finally, this campaign was made possible by a grant from the Australian Government. The codes listed above are highly restrictive, but this final point in regards to federal supervision and approval is what made the environment particularly challenging from a creative perspective.

Most Australians think they have healthy lungs. But how would they know if they’ve never had them checked? That’s why Lung Foundation Australia, felt it needed to do something. The idea behind the campaign? To show everyday Australians quite literally, “Checking in with their lungs”.

The campaign directed Australians to a website, where they could complete the Lung Health Checklist, which advised them to see their doctor if something was wrong. Bus commuters were able to complete the checklist, using interactive digital bus shelters. Newspapers, magazine, out-door cinema, music festival sponsorship, PR activity and other targeted social media activity broadened the campaign.

The campaign led to an extra 700,000 Australians considering their lung health as important. 43,500 lung health check lists were completed. That’s 9.6 times the campaign benchmark. Of those who completed the checklist, 60% were at significant risk of lung disease.

The aim of this first ever national campaign for LFA was to increase awareness of lung disease and get Australians aged 30 and over to engage with their own lung health to identify risk factors, ultimately increasing early diagnosis of lung disease. To facilitate this, LFA created the Lung Health Checklist, an eight-page online tool to identify symptoms or risk factors of lung disease.

The objectives were three-fold:

1. Grow unique website visits by 45%, to a total of 30,400

2. Get 4,560 Australians to engage with the Lung Health Checklist

3. Increase awareness and understanding over the campaign period

Our big idea was to dramatise the simplicity of taking action on lung health.

Our way to increase engagement with lung health was to show ordinary Australians just how easy it is to think seriously about their lung health by creating the slightly absurd action of checking their lungs by tucking their head down their top. We termed this action ‘checking in with your lungs’, which became our campaign sign-off and call-to-action. The gentle humour gained attention without being flippant. While distinct and intriguing, the idea was simple enough to work effectively as a static image, while the TVC and multiple executions allowed us to show a range of characters to establish just how wide-reaching lung disease is.

All targets for the 3-month campaign were significantly over-achieved:

Objective 1: Grow unique website visits by 45%, to a total of 30,400

Result: Unique website visit growth of 199%, to a total of 62,805

Objective 2: Get 4,560 Australians to engage with the Lung Health Checklist

Result: 43,736 Australians engaged with the Lung Health Checklist

Objective 3: Increase issue awareness and understanding over the campaign period

Results: a) Increased the perception that lung health is important, up from 80% before the campaign to 84% following the campaign. This is reflective of an extra 700,000 Australians now viewing lung health as important.

b) Increased the number of people who ‘often’ or ‘always’ think about their lung health, from 14% to 17%. While this increase may seem modest this equates to an increase of 525,000 Australians, from under 2.5 million up to 3 million, who now regularly think about their lung health.

We conducted qualitative and quantitative research to uncover three strategic imperatives:

1. Given lung disease is associated with the elderly, we must over-emphasise how broad-reaching lung disease really is, weighting the communication to younger generations.

2. Given lung disease is associated with smokers, we must be completely unlike anti-smoking ads. Consumers told us that they knew an anti-smoking ad as soon as it started, and that was a bad thing. We must break that norm by avoiding the morbid, without being fickle.

3. Lung disease seems just too hard to engage with, but with a very usable tool in the Lung Health Checklist, our campaign could and needed to move lung disease from an invisible, unknowable problem toward a simple solution.

Most Australians say their lung health is important, yet 53% admit they rarely think about it. This is concerning, given a massive one in seven deaths in Australia are due to lung disease. The reason most Australians ignore lung disease is that they think it only impacts smokers or the elderly, whereas in reality it is indiscriminate.

Despite the severity and prevalence, lung health has attracted little attention. Despite being the preeminent lung health charity, Lung Foundation Australia (LFA) had very low brand awareness compared to the heart and cancer charities.