“Bottom-powered” digital campaign wins Ocean Outdoor advertising prize

UK charity, Prost8, and Manchester-based agency, TBWA\MCR, have been awarded the European Grand Prix in Ocean Outdoor’s annual Digital Creative Competition, which aims to reward bold ideas in digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising.

The winning campaign is based on the insight that men avoid having a prostate cancer test because they mistakenly believe it involves “a finger up the bottom.” In fact, modern prostate cancer checks simply involve a blood test taken from the arm.

As part of the interactive DOOH campaign, members of the public are invited to play a game on a digital billboard called ‘Dodge the Finger’, where they control a ‘digital bottom’ with their physical bottom using Ocean’s skeletal tracking technology.

During the game, players dodge a virtual rocket-powered finger while collecting ‘peaches’ which reveal educational facts about prostate cancer. At the end, Ocean’s scanning technology can take a picture of the participant, adding the photo to a leaderboard of high scores.

The campaign has been hailed by Ocean Outdoor as “the first digital screen to be activated by a bottom.”

Glenn Scholefield, senior copywriter, and Tom Holmes, senior art director, both at TBWA\MCR, say: “We’re absolutely thrilled to win this competition.

“Challenging misconceptions about prostate checks will save lives, and this level of media exposure means the impact will be enormous. Using humour in these big spots gives us a powerful way to connect with the blokes who need to hear this message.”

Around 12,000 men die from prostate cancer each year in the UK, making it the most common cancer in men and a significant cause of cancer death, often due to late diagnosis because early stages have few symptoms.

The Ocean Outdoor European Grand Prix was selected by an international jury of experts from a shortlist of 12 brands who won Gold across the regional Ocean Digital Creative competitions in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.

For this year's competition, the 12 Golds were whittled down from a record 524 entries, a significant jump from the previous year.

First introduced last year, the Grand Prix is an incremental prize over and above the £100k of screen space already awarded to Prost8 as UK Gold winners in the commercial award category.

The prize includes a one-week campaign of Prost8’s choice to appear across six of Ocean’s European wide-format digital screens including the Amsterdam Leidseplein, The Halo at Westfield Scandinavia in Stockholm, and in London on the Landsec’s Piccadilly Lights estate.