When it comes to marketing innovation, Jason Olive is clear about the three key ingredients, but they’re not the usual tools of the trade. “I know we could be talking about data or marketing stacks here, but I really think it comes down to three broad organisational principles - bravery, trust and insightful challenge,” Olive said

“On bravery, you can say that you’re innovative, but if organisationally you’re not brave enough, it will only take you so far. I’m not saying that bravery comes at the expense of working through challenges and threats, but organisations (not just brands themselves) have to have bravery at their core to truly innovate in the current landscape,” he said.

While trust might sound basic, being brave and innovative is only successful when people trust each other and there is a core unifying outcome. And it’s necessary to be insightful. To be really innovative, there has to be some robust methodologies employed around how you pressure test decisions and approaches to avoid group think and subjective outcomes.”

Marketing effectiveness

During Movember’s 2019 fundraising campaign, it faced a business challenge internally named the ‘Weekend Effect’, when Movember ends on a weekend and donations drop 20 per cent.

“We had a solid acquisition campaign to get people fundraising, but nothing when it came to stimulating final weekend donations. I knew we had to outsmart our former approach which was to run similar donation content as the month closed,” said Olive.
“Using a small budget, I briefed our agency on how might we deliver something disruptive that reverses the weekend effect. The winning idea was making the itchy ‘pash rash’ your partner has endured during Movember worthwhile,” he said.

The creative was provocative: androgynous models with pash rash in all its glory, with a compelling call-to-action, ‘make your pash rash worth it’. The messaging was tweaked across channels, leveraging digital media to measure donations - with additional CSA out of home. Social content integrated with MoBro's pages driving peer-to-peer donations. To carry this brave idea forward there was significant leadership required to demonstrate that considered innovation does have an impact on the bottom line.”

“The campaign was multi-layered to drive donations. We also launched a limited edition moisturiser, Movember Rain, to soothe the aforementioned pash rash. People could get their hands on it through a fundraising sprint, seeing over 800 participants increase to a new fundraising threshold. This small element of the campaign alone raised over $81,000.”

“Finally, we partnered with JCDecaux on a world-first technology innovation on George Street. The idea was taken further with a digital panel that took photos of MoBros moustaches. The technology recognised moustaches, rewarding them with a Movember Rain moisturiser and a message ‘that Mo could do some damage’. The panels also included a donation call-to-action for passers by. In summary, we successfully ‘won back’ $1.3 million in donations vs. our original projections.”

Influencing change

While responsible for the Australian strategy, Olive also sits on the global senior marketing group, responsible for the global three-year marketing strategy. It is here that he has influenced organisational change in the way the organisation approaches media and broader communications planning.

Olive wanted to take the campaign from marketing Movember predominantly as a month-long fundraiser, with a few year-round moments to strategically marketing ourselves year round, to engaging with different audiences, and delivering income and impact year-round.

“For the past year, I have been bringing teams together that have previously not worked together. For example, our media agency now works closely with our CX and product teams to really understand attitudinal motivators for driving behaviour change, vs. focusing solely on demographics,” he said.

“We build campaigns in ecosystems and think of the audience first vs. channel first. The team really considers how we extract value from our plans. This culminated recently in the appointment of one agency for our media efforts across digital, TV and all paid media touchpoints instead of having two separate agencies where we had one agency for social and digital spends based in another market and a local agency for everything else.”
“And to ensure that we continue to deliver best practise work, I’ve introduced monthly education sessions from external media providers such as TikTok and Twitch. These efforts with our new media agency helped us unlock a substantial amount in donated media for a recent campaign and more broadly deliver over four times the we achieved by this time last year.”

Data-led marketing

Movember has to deploy a range of first, second and third-party data to ensure it is making smart decisions with limited budgets, helping it select the highest value segments, or understand which communities are most in need. In short, this helps to define its revenue or impact decisions.

One recent example where this has been developed successfully was via the launch of its podcast, Dad In Progress, leveraging mass media to drive behaviour change. Mental health is one cause area that Movember funds. “We know that key life events are triggers for a change in someone’s mental health outcomes, but we didn’t have a considerable amount of local data on this,” Olive said.

“Consequently, we ran a survey asking 18-75-year-old men about their experiences of fatherhood. It turned out that one in five Australian men had lost close mates after becoming a dad. Likewise, our research revealed that 26 per cent of new fathers felt socially isolated,” Olive said.

“We partnered with Betoota Advocate who helped us produce the podcast. We identified 800,000 dads with our media agency and narrowed this down to 200,000 new dads, who would most likely need this resource vs. all dads. We also leveraged our CRM to identify dads within our network. We needed to deliver impact  and minimise wastage,” he said.

The research and efforts paid off, reaching 60,000 new dads via Facebook ads, PR and owned channels, resulting in relevant engagement and listens from thousands of dads, and charting in the top 20 health and fitness podcast charts (during COVID-19). “It averaged a 4.5 star rating, and from our early qualitative impact research, it signals that those dads who listened are more likely to reach out for help, and even started implementing the strategies learnt in the podcast to great effect,” he said.

CX capability

Movember pivoted from spending significant dollars on its own content efforts to putting the hands of the brand into the hands of fellow MoBros to cut through and improve the customer experience. “We have an internal CX team, a global central team who have previously worked very separate to local marketing teams. I have brought these teams closer, having weekly sessions that help us ensure that we are delivering communications that really drive impact,” Olive said.

One successful output from this closer cross-functional relationship was testing a hypothesis around the impact of putting the brand and content into the hands of our community. “We had a new mental health product that we needed to get in the hands of Australians to encourage them to have better conversations with men. This tool was aimed at both men and women and walks them through more in depth conversations techniques. The previous activity (without the collaboration) saw middling results when it came to driving traffic and conversations with this product. This activity saw the delivery of a shoot (owned content) and a lengthy media process,” he said.

“To test out the hypothesis around leveraging community content, we engaged external unpaid support from TikTok. The campaign saw us engage local TikTok MoBros/comedians Aunty Donna who created a short comedic snippet driving people to have better conversations through the new tool. TikTok also donated $95k in donated media.”

The new campaign significantly outperformed the former campaign engagement, driving over 760,000 visits to the new tool across the campaign (up 1981 per cent in visits from the previous campaign) without any hard costs/investment. “We have since increased our understanding of a new platform and continue to work cross functionally to build out new ways of putting the brand into the hands of others.”

Commercial acumen

“We cannot talk about commercial acumen without talking about the hallmark campaign, the annual Movember fundraising month. Last year we had a stellar year, with the team delivering a campaign that increased donations raised by 15 per cent, totalling $29 million in donations,” Olive said.

“Marketing was integral in driving this growth and our media worked harder than ever. The KPMG Marketing Mix Modelling report provides us with a robust analysis of marketing effectiveness based on the model findings. The model utilises the expertise of the KPMG customer, brand and marketing advisory and economics practice, and leverages regression analysis to isolate the impact of each marketing channel on the chosen measures of return, registrations and donations,” he said.

In essence, it came down to effective media communications planning and leveraging a smart modular ad campaign that focused on leveraging our most distinctive asset in all its glory - the moustache. “To supplement this, we focused on leveraging the impactful work we do to supplement these communications. We’ve certainly hit a high benchmark for this year’s fundraising campaign. Finally, we created a strong and compelling reminder to drive end of month donations to mitigate the weekend effect seen in previous years.”

COVID-19 innovation

“Social isolation, unemployment and financial difficulty have had really devastating effects on mental health in the wake of COVID- 19,” noted Olive. Movember research found that 80 per cent of men really wanted to be checked in on by mates - 50 per cent of those men flagged no one had checked in with how they were coping during that time.

“Movember runs an annual campaign called MayEight, encouraging men to connect. This year, with physical gatherings cancelled, we had to change tact. The research suggested that we had scope to supercharge our efforts, to reach more men and provide them with the tools that they needed,” he said.

“With a clear pivot required on our existing plans, we worked with briefed agency Gen-C who presented MayEight Festival, a world-first virtual festival fostering conversation and connection between mates - precisely what MayEight was all about. The 13-hour Facebook streamed festival included live music, fitness and wellbeing classes and ended in an evening of comedy.”

“During programming, we weaved in ‘health by stealth’ messaging, driving to a newly created product, Movember Conversations - helping men have better conversations, past the typical ‘how’s it going’ conversation.”

Launching the festival through talent teasers, with significant donated media, social ads and TikTok takeover, it reached over 5 million people in the lead up to the festival 33,000 views of the festival stream. Website traffic was up significantly YOY, plus visits to the new conversation platform Movember Conversations.

Adapting in just five weeks, this was the first big foray into virtual events, relying on large amounts of cross-functional collaboration and collaboration across the business from technology, legal and finance. “We now have some clear learnings to aid us in future virtual events and have even been asked (and helped) other charities looking to get into the world of virtual,” said Olive.

Cross-functional collaboration

Joining Movember from agencies and consultancies, one of Olive’s discoveries was that while the organisation had to look closely at hard costs, it often overlooked the people costs, like overall time spent and how teams work together cross-functionally.

The big headline in my three-month observations was that we needed to help the marketing team find more time. Not-for-profits are often under resourced, delivering campaigns and work on a shoestring. We needed to apply the same lean and agile thinking on the way we work. I needed to find places that we were over investing time,” he said.

"Teams were over collaborating. To collaborate more effectively in the first place, we needed to better define collaboration and even discuss collaborating less.” Olive found cross-collaboration was happening, but individuals were unclear why. This meant significant time spent on stakeholder management across teams (in meetings), but without clearly understanding everyone’s roles. Cross-functional difficulties when it came to decision making.

The solution was in re-defining collaboration and creating cross-functional ‘core teams’. “Less people in meetings, distilling it down to the people who need to be there. Clear identification of the decision makers. Added to that external training on how to give and receive feedback,” he said.

Critically, collaboration is one part of this ‘time’ roadmap. Resilience training is next on the agenda to ensure the teams can thrive in a world of change. “I have seen a positive increase in team survey scores around the topic. People know where to collaborate, feeling empowered to speak up when things are not working,” he added.
While it’s difficult to isolate the attribution, this will no doubt have a significant impact on one of our organisational goals of staff retention.”