I know, I know. It’s been a minute. What can I say, we’ve been busy. But don’t worry we’re back putting out case studies and championing what matters most, the idea and the creativity behind it.
PSA: the results obviously matter too but do you think we would put out a case study that didn’t get great results? Don’t be silly now.
So here goes, let’s talk about our latest campaign for MedExpress UK. Bit of background info before we jump in. MedExpress are an online pharmaceutical company. What this means is high-value commercial terms and a lot of key category competition. The focus of this campaign? Erectile dysfunction.
The Idea
Come On You Blues tied together sports and culturally relevant moments in gaming to create media moments throughout the campaign. The main campaign looked at how football’s drinking culture is affecting your game in the bedroom. There is a known link between ED and drinking and we wanted to raise awareness with football’s most avid fans of the truth behind alcohol’s impact on your health, specifically sexual performance.
The campaign used survey data to find the insight for the campaign – primarily that 45% of football fans believe football drinking culture directly impacts their sexual performance.
But we didn’t stop there. We launched a “keepy uppy” challenge with ex-footballers and educational social content to give this campaign a cross-channel execution and break the stigma men have around talking about ED.
How we came up with the idea
So how do you make the sensitive topic of ED relatable to to our target audience? The answer lies in linking it to what men love and obsess over – football. If the campaign was linked to football this would allow discussions around ED to be more relatable, approachable, and easier for men (and journalists) to engage with.
But good ideas always can start with singular insights. We found the following stats:
- It was estimated 604 million pints were consumed during Euros 2024, nearly double the 2020 Euros
- 87% of football fans admit to drinking more alcohol when a live game is on
- Alcohol decreases blood flow, causes dehydration, slows brain signals and lowers testosterone which can cause ED
So this naturally gave us this very scientific calculation:
A Euros summer + beer = erectile dysfunction across the nation
And that’s how it started, we even tested the water to see if this was a press-worthy link by running a successful proactive along similar lines:
It landed.
*And maybe this could be my favourite proactive ever. Yes – even more than jumping on Rawdogging your food for Protein Works – but that story is for another day.
The execution and format
First off – the data. Although we had found insight through desk research and linking ideas together, we needed some proprietary data to give this campaign a fresh story and a new hook for journalists. For this, we conducted a UK survey to uncover the truth behind football’s drinking culture and how it’s affecting fans’ sexual health.
Some key findings:
- 56% of fans have experienced ED
- 45% believe drinking culture affects their sexual performance
- 84% still believe there’s a stigma around discussing ED
These were the key findings and we could have stopped there and gone straight out to press. But there were more angles in this. So along with our headline stats, we also went down and looked at different fan bases.
We identified that the fans with the largest drinking culture also had the highest rates of ED. So what did we do to pit fans against each other? We made a keepy-uppy league table of course just to add a bit of friendly competition.
But again, it’s not like us to stop there. We wanted to break the stigma around ED among men, and where better to do that than on social media? And who better to do it than professional ex-footballers?
The next part of our campaign took us across the Channel. We launched a keepy-uppy challenge on social media to physically demonstrate and raise awareness about how alcohol affects men’s sexual performance. We did this by challenging ex-professional football players to spin around a football 10 times to simulate the feeling of being drunk, then asking them to ‘keep it up.
Jay Bothroyd couldn’t keep it up.
Ian Holloway couldn’t keep it up.
Tony Cottee couldn’t keep it up.
This all hammered home the key message, that keeping it up shouldn’t be that difficult. But this wasn’t finished yet, we carried on the journey over on the MedExpress Instagram channel where we had created a whole host of educational content all to do with ED.
A Bottled Imagination idea
Now if you want to check the results, you can head over to the case study. But this campaign is a prime example of how one piece of well-constructed insight can lead to a cross-channel campaign.
It’s worth mentioning that we also landed our erectile dysfunction reactives on meme pages—a move that’s possible when the content is tied so closely to a pop culture moment. But we’ll save that story for another time. What’s that saying about leaving people wanting…
