More than 14 Million Australians are overweight or obese. Obesity is now the leading cause of premature death and illness in Australia.

Australian biotechnology company, Probiotec, has a product called Impromy, that Ellis Jones launched via a media relations campaign to immediate market success. To scale the product’s growth and therefore its impact, a pledge campaign was developed.

Developed in collaboration with the CSIRO, Impromy is a multilevel health and wellbeing program that sees customers receive regular health consultations from pharmacy consultants, while consuming a suite of nutrition products to assist in weight reduction. It focuses on health metrics, not body image.

Obesity is related to a range of factors including food, lifestyle, social context, genetics and activity (to name a few). Impromy addresses some but not all of these. A person needs strong social support to maintain motivation and get results.

Through Impromy, Australia’s fastest-growing weight management and health improvement program, the company decided to engage Australians in change.

#BeTheLast is a social mobilisation campaign that invites people to pledge to change their behaviour or that of people around them to help end the endemic condition of obesity in Australia.

By engaging its pharmacies, 20,000+ members (at the time the campaign started) and partners, and the CSIRO to make pledges, the campaign kicked off. A website was designed to host and rank pledges, and eDMs were created to run regularly to share successes and provide incentives.

Partner organisations in fitness, food and other related industries (e.g. HelloFresh and Anytime Fitness) contributed prizes and communications enabling the reach to scale quickly. Both the #BeTheLast and the newly branded Impromy Facebook feeds shared pledges, motivation, stats and updates.

Ellis Jones also designed a BMI test into the web application that captured data and referred users to participating pharmacies to get further support and diagnoses.

A great success, the campaign resulted in:

• The highest Impromy sales for January and February ever, with 4,270 new members joining over the campaign period
• Throughout the 4-month campaign, 2079 unique visits were made to the microsite and 473 health pledges were submitted online.
• The campaign’s positive reception on social media lead to a gain of 809 followers across #BeTheLast social accounts, more than 300 pharmacies activated the campaign locally, and there was a strong re-engagement of current Impromy members whose commitment to the program had lapsed.

Bold branding and a clear, concise visual language throughout the campaign contributed to its visibility and success. Colourful iconography, maps and diagrams made the message easy to understand at a glance, without the need for large amounts of text.

This made the application of the design concept easy to transfer to any media, at any size. The campaign demonstrates the role of cross-sector partnerships in driving change through a shared value approach to business and societal returns.