World Obesity Federation

Brisk are delighted to be chosen as the 2019/2020 marketing agency for the World Obesity Federation.

The appointment follows on from the delivery of a hugely successful marketing campaign at the end of 2018.

World Obesity is dedicated to solving the international problem of obesity by uniting scientific, medical and research communities across the globe. The organisation strengthens the cooperative ties between regional and national obesity associations, and helps its network of members to share latest thinking and best practice on the prevention, treatment and management of obesity.

The brief

Our primary focus was the promotion of SCOPE, the obesity education programme for global healthcare professionals. Combining an e-learning platform with live learning events, SCOPE brings together the latest insight, best practice and research on the prevention, treatment and management of obesity. The educational content that is delivered enables participants to achieve the SCOPE Certification, an internationally-recognised standard of obesity prevention and management expertise.

Key challenges

Brisk was tasked with growing SCOPE’s online presence and attracting attendees to two training events that were taking place in Brazil and Cape Town. We needed to deliver a marketing strategy and campaign that would double the delegate list for both events.

World Obesity did not have a clear geographic or professional segmentation of their audience. There were disparate sources of data from various systems, legacy and current and they were mid-transition into new platforms too. In order to attract attendees, we needed to get fully acquainted with the World Obesity’s database. After a data deep dive, we obtained some incredible directive insight, both for our campaigns, and for the World Obesity as a whole.

Two of the main challenges with any marketing strategy are the big, often rhetorical questions of ‘who?’ and ‘what?’ Who are we communicating to and what do we mean to them? (As well as what do we offer them, how do we speak to them?) Our deep dive enabled us to move this from rhetoric to real through data analysis. Our approach was to combine this data to find out the key determinant factors that make any marketing campaign successful. Who are we talking to and in this case where are they?

From our data dive, we dissected SCOPE’s target audiences into four distinct segments. We then used the reconfigured database to create social profiles on both Facebook and LinkedIn. By mining the data, we were able to create audiences, lookalike audiences for algorithmic matching and also interest-based and job-title based audiences in three segments of healthcare professionals.

We discovered a relatively low quantity of data in regions specific to the events for direct communication via email. We still used email as a communication method, but realised this medium was not going to be as effective as we needed it to be, even if we had a high conversion rate of recipients to attendees.

After we identified the audience personas, we then crafted compelling content that appealed to each audience requirement and was centred around the key learning outcomes. For example, we targeted the regions with compelling messages around joining their peers, FOMO, rhetorical professional doubt (are you ready for the obesity epidemic in X country) and supplemented this with a sense of urgency with the rather shocking statistics of the rise of obesity.

Once we’d established the copy and visual style, we then configured a range of different marketing techniques to get the new messaging in front of each desired audience. This involved building target landing pages for each event and implementing a large span of advertising techniques aimed at the different personas across a range of advertising channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Results

Our marketing campaign achieved outstanding results, with each SCOPE school attracting more attendees than in the past. The main achievement is that we unlocked the power of the data they already had and turned it into genuine insight that had reached far beyond the initial scope. We helped WOF identify their customer segments and construct campaigns for the future, but also secure funding from donors as a non-profit by showing the incredible global reach and the power of their influence. On a practical level, we enabled a clearer view of where they should focus on events for maximum attendance but also where there is a disparity in population size and their data – representing an opportunity for growth in their user base.

In the short space of time we ran our marketing campaign, we:

• Reached more than 445,000 targeted people on Facebook, with almost one million ad impressions
• Drove over 7,400 people to the Brazil event landing page and increased the previous year’s bookings by 110%
• Sent geo-segmented email campaigns to a largely unengaged audience, yet achieved amazing open and click-through rates (37-39%) due to our highly-targeted approach
• Compiled eight different datasets to merge, de-duplicate and then align everything to singular records. This included 1.63 million data points when, once merged, created a focus list of 91,000 records
• Re-positioned the brand identity and focus copy to be more suited and aligned to the recipients
• Built a multi-pronged marketing strategy based on data insight
• Created a range of digital marketing materials, including landing pages, social media graphics, print collateral, email marketing materials and videos

The above activity clearly demonstrates our ability to add value and deliver targeted marketing activity that works. This has resulted in Brisk being appointed as the WOF’s marketing provider for the next 12 months.

Everybody at Brisk is really excited to be working with the WOF again and are already focused on the next wave of delivery, which will involve more insight-led targeted campaigns, plus digital and design support across the entire organisation.

What they said:

“We started working with Brisk last year at a particularly challenging time for our organisation when we had lots of deliverables and little time to achieve our goals. They were (and still are) in charge of developing a marketing strategy and producing material for all of our online and live education programs and events.

Brisk jumped right in and their whole team was able to quickly understand our organisation, our work practices (which in the case of a charity might be different), our needs and taste and produced really attractive material for us while also keeping our brand integrity.

They were also able to expand our reach in various countries, which for an international organisation is crucial, and provided us with lots of data that allowed us to better understand who our user is. Everyone at the agency has always been very responsive, quick, attentive and kind. We really enjoy working with them and are excited to continue our collaboration!”

Olivia Barata Cavalcanti
Director of Science and Education – World Obesity Federation