The Challenge Trial Documentary was created for two main purposes. First, to highlight the groundbreaking clinical trial funded by the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) which shows that physical activity can significantly improve outcomes for people with colon cancer. Second, to help support the launch of Cancer Trials Canada a new website that aims to improve access to clinical trials for Canadians. By featuring the 17-year international trial involving 889 people, including cancer survivor Terri Swain-Collins (featured) we hoped to showcase the benefits, importance and impact that clinical trials can make. Both to inspire Canadians to seek clinical trials, and to utilize Cancer Trials Canada to find these trials.
This project came to life two-fold. First, we were brought into advance embargoed conversations about the Challenge Trial and that after 17-years we were ready to make the “blockbuster” results public. We were able to say that physical activity can significantly improve outcomes for people with colon cancer and that the impacts of these findings based on the length of the study and the intervention being exercise was going to have widespread implications. We wanted to share these findings far and wide and producing this documentary and telling the story of the trial was of utmost importance. Simultaneous to that, we had been planning for the launch of Cancer Trials Canada, our new website and searchable database for finding clinical trials. Part of this content plan was to explain the benefit, impact and value of clinical trials and what better way to do that then to showcase how participation in one (like for our stroyteller Terri) can be life-changing and saving. It became clear that combining these two efforts together and making this clinical trial story our foundational content piece surrounding the Cancer Trials Canada launch was as win-win for the organization. We began working with all parties including Queen’s University and Dr. Chris Booth, Canadian Cancer Trials Group (CCTG) and Dr. Chris O’Callaghan and our stroyteller Terri to orchestrate a multi-day shoot on site in Kingston, Ontario with our videography team, Signature Video Group. Aligning all three parties, the various hospital and CCTG communications teams and our storyteller was no simple task but we were able to secure all their availability and began crafting our 17-year long narrative. Our greatest challenge is how do you tell a 17-year story, spanning 800+ participants in a small period of time. Giving intentional time to Terri and her personal story while not overshadowing the truly incredible results, explaining what they mean for the cancer ecosystem and where we go from here. Ultimately we were able to strike a very key balance of all of these factors which has lead to an immensely communicative, powerful piece that showcases the benefit and impact clinical trials can make to not only science but the individual.
The results of the documentary were a resounding success. The piece was used across all our marketing activities including website, storytelling, paid media, organic social media, internal and external communications and countless direct email communications through our donor, fundraising and e-newsletter teams. The 8 minute documentary piece was the focal point of the project and this application but the content was subsequently cut and edited to create 4 minute, 30 second, 15 second and 6 second ads to support use of Cancer Trials Canada site and additionally has been utilized for various other content initatives including when Europe recently announced they are adopting the new standard of care practice the video showcases. Our organization has not traditionally supported the creation of such long form pieces and seeing the impact depeer stroytelling like this can have across the organization has been monumental. There are calls for more storytelling of this nature for both internal and external campaigns and we have plans to create more deep and long-form content like this in the future to show the story behind our world-leading research. A huge step in the age of shorter, faster tik-tokification of content models.
Paid media results were especially impressive with the overall campaign serving over 16M impressions and generated nearly 127k clicks and the driver of that being our paid media ad from the documentary being the top performer, generating 64% of total impressions and 65% of total clicks.
