NHS
Catch feelings,
not HPV.
Public health that got invited to the party. We took HPV vaccination to Europe's largest LGBTQ+ music festival and turned a medical obligation into something people wanted to wear.
6.4%
Click-through rate on Grindr, against 0.85% on Snapchat
43,000
People passed campaign visuals across a single weekend
51 secs
Average attention time on site. Most OOH takes a month for that
The Challenge
The audience at highest risk of HPV-associated cancers is the audience least well served by the way healthcare talks.
<p>The NHS has committed to eliminating cervical cancer by 2040, and that ambition runs through HPV vaccination. Vaccination runs into a wall with young LGBTQ+ Londoners, and with men who have sex with men in particular.</p><p>Three things had to happen. Young adults aged 16 to 30 needed to know what the vaccine does. MSM audiences needed to understand their elevated risk of HPV-associated cancers, which almost nothing in mainstream health communication had ever told them. And the whole thing needed emotional weight, because information alone has never moved a needle on vaccination.</p><p>All of it on a budget under £50,000.</p>
So we didn't make one.
So we didn't make one.
The loudest voices talking Aberdeen down were Aberdonians. Decades of oil-town shorthand had been internalised by the very people who could most credibly sell the place, so any campaign aimed only at the central belt would be arguing against the city's own residents. We built for both audiences at once.
Young people are not looking for the best skyline. They are looking for discovery, authenticity and things worth photographing that nobody has photographed yet. Aberdeen has all of it. It had simply never been positioned as a place you find things, because it had always been positioned as a place you work.
What We Did
Short form video
Carried the discovery
TikTok, Meta and YouTube ran mobile-first films built around reveals rather than claims. The beach nobody knew was there. The café at the end of the lane. The light on the coast at seven in the morning. Every asset was designed to make a viewer say “that’s Aberdeen?”
Creators
Supplied the proof
Local micro-influencers explored the city’s hidden gems in real time, sharing independent eateries, cliff walks and community hubs with their own followers in their own voice. Peer-led storytelling did what no paid asset could.
Outdoor
Put the argument in front of the doubters
Roadside D6 Adshels, mall screens, and digital outdoor in Dundee and Glasgow. We bought the commute and the shopping trip, hitting young audiences in the cities where the stereotype was strongest.
Co-creation
Gave it legitimacy
Content was built local businesses and city ambassadors, so the campaign reflected genuine local pride rather than a marketing department’s version of it. That collaboration is why the work landed with Aberdonians instead of irritating them.
The Results
Attention
YouTube content passed 170,000 views, with 70% watched on connected TV screens. That is not scroll-past reach. That is families watching a city make its case on the biggest screen in the house, which is why the work moved parents as well as applicants.
Intent
Traffic to destination-specific campaign pages surged, with time on site rising alongside it. People were not clicking and bouncing. They were reading.
Behaviour
We ran a Rubin causal inference model across 36 months of search volume for “RGU” and “RGU Aberdeen”, isolating the campaign period against the underlying trend. The lift attributable to the campaign was 31.2%. Not impressions. Not clicks. Demand.
Outcome (Applications)
RGU reported record application levels following the campaign, with growth in business programmes and a seven-year high in applications across Scotland.
Sentiment
Qualitative feedback from students and residents came back in the language of rediscovery and civic pride. The emotional target was hit as squarely as the numerical one.