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The media plan: How Movember will become an ‘all year’ brand

The media plan: How Movember will become an ‘all year’ brand

Movember, the global charitable foundation that specialises in male cancer and mental health causes, has appointed Bicycle to handle its seven-figure media account.

It’s a significant win for Bicycle, the new “media experience” agency co-founded by CEO Henry Daglish in May. Movember was a founding client for Bountiful Cow, the the7stars-backed agency founded by Daglish five years ago, but has now followed Daglish to his new venture.

The scope for Movember now includes media strategy, planning and buying and covers online and offline work. But the overall objective remains the same: use marketing to help increase the number of donations.

Whereas charity advertising typically consists of direct-response advertising on TV (shown during daytime to maximise frequency on a tight budget), as well as highly targeted digital channels, Movember will pursue an approach that is closer to “brand-building” and longer-term consideration.

“The work that I personally did on it across those five years, has helped them grow their fundraising to over £13m last year,” Daglish told Mediatel News. “That’s come about from a strategic guidance with them that has helped them manage this whole ‘brand versus performance’ challenge that exists acutely in charities.”

In terms of media execution, Movember will begin to “tell positive stories about the work they do all year, because they can’t be seen just as a November moment,” Daglish said.

He said: “You never see Movember running ‘heart bleeding’ ads, begging for people to give them money. What they’ve done is they’ve created a really nice attractive world and brand around the whole Mo Bro thing and that naturally drives registrations and donations.

“We fought really hard with them to protect that, as opposed to jumping on to the short term performance, you know, cost-per-donation type model.”

Converting Mo Bros

The goal of Movember is to “change the face of men’s health”, a mission that is almost taken literally by encouraging men to grow moustaches during November. During 2020, the charity raised over £14m for good causes, and Bicycle have been retained to help exceed that figure in 2021.

Since launching in Australia in 2003, Movember has signed up over 6 million “Mo Bros and Mo Sisters” as registered supporters. However, the charity now faces a challenge in converting Mo Bros into donors.

Daglish explained: “Where they have real struggles is around the retention across the rest of the year: how they convert people from a registration to a donation, and how they drive donations from their friends with Mo Bro.

“That’s largely due to a combination of the effects of GDPR and the need to improve their CRM. And also their digital acquisition conversion channels have been managed by different markets in different ways.”

Lauren Ogundeko, who joined from PHD to be the start-up agency’s co-founder and chief digital officer, will work with Movember’s team in Australia to build out the strategy for getting Mo Bros to donate all around the year.

Since launching four months ago, Bicycle has also picked up accounts for Duolingo, Terra Virtua, Faith in Nature, LiveScore and Virgin Bet.

The agency has seven co-founders: Daglish, Ogundeko, chief client officer Erika Mari and  chief strategy officer Graeme Douglas (who also worked on Movember while at Bountiful Cow), as well as former Havas Sports & Entertainment CEO Pedro Avery, the7stars co-founder Mark Jarvis and finance director Reema Patel (formerly of Wieden & Kennedy and The Kite Factory).

The agency promotes itself as a “media experience (MX) design agency”, with MX engineered to work well with a brand’s customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) disciplines.

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