• by Les Luchter , 2 hours ago

“It's time to stop stressing and start squeezing” – Stressticles campaign video.

The possibility of testicular cancer can be stigma-inducing and touchy, but there’s now a “touchy” self-exam that might help.

Bringing a hands-on approach to awareness and education, the Testicular Cancer Foundation (TCF) and IPG Health’s Neon agency have launched Stressticles, a physical product and campaign under the tagline, “Grab Cancer by the Balls.”

Those most at risk for testicular cancer are aged 15 to 35, and Kevin Williams, Neon’s group creative director, tells Marketing Daily that “balls are funny, cancer isn’t,” and that Stressticles is “designed to break through to this target demo with humor to create a memorable experience.”

Available for $9.99 from a campaign website, Stressticles comes in the form of a do-it-yourself kit that, once constructed, provides users with a faux set of scrotum and testicles -- one cancer-free, one with an early stage tumor. Then, per this instructional video, “the only thing left to do is give your balls a squeeze…You'll learn what to feel for during your testicular self- exam.”

“Until you’re able to actually experience and feel it, you don’t have that sensation of what you’re looking for,” explains Williams.

Most of the Stressticles instructions, though, concern how to build the Stressticles out of two balloons, two fuzzy balls and two cups of slime. “Once it’s fully constructed, the interaction of the normal testicle and the one that has the tumor establishes a great baseline for anyone who’s at risk, which is part of our core mission,” Williams says.

TCF CEO Kenny Kane says Stressticles moves the nonprofit into a “show” rather than “tell” method of disease education. Previously, he says, TCF has tried to mostly arm caregivers with “as much as we could in terms of data and textual information. What the Stressticles campaign does really well is generate a spark for a conversation." 

Stressticles, can also help avoiding situations in which, let’s say, a 15-year-old “has been walking around with testicular cancer for a few months, they’ve been scared to bring it up to their parents, scared to seek medical advice, and it’s progressed past stage one,” Kane says.

While Kane says that Stressticles “is primarily educational for someone who’s at risk and can go from feeling the stressticles kit to giving themselves a self-exam,” he says the campaign is also beneficial for “anybody who wants to learn more about testicular cancer.”

"We’re not limiting the activation to men,” adds Williams, “because partners and caregivers can also detect changes or lumps, offering another opportunity to catch testicular cancer early. This is especially important since men often don’t speak up about health issues.” 

Stressticles is being marketed largely through earned media and an infomercial-like humorous campaign video, currently running on YouTube and social media. An initial run of 1,000 Stressticles kits have been produced to coincide with November’s Men’s Health Awareness Month. 

Williams says “there’s a capacity for more, depending on if we go viral, but that’s the first batch and we’ll see how it goes.” Kane calls this month “a bit of a proof-of-concept, seeing what the initial response is, what the resources are in terms of the physical goods.”

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If the campaign goes on, Williams says some influencer and creator partnerships are a possibility.

While stressing that Stressticles is not an FDA-approved medical device, Kane hopes it might be “adopted as sort of a teaching tool” in the health community.  “When pharma puts out a new inhaler or some sort of medical device,” he says, providing  an analogy, “it comes with a test unit which doesn’t have the medicine in it.”

Stressticles is for informational/educational purposes only, he says, “but we do have validation from experts who got their hands on it.”

“Uncannily accurate for some balloons,” says one testicular cancer survivor in the campaign video. “It feels pretty real. It's been a while since I felt two balls,” says another.

Kane says TCF will judge campaign success not only on Stressticles sales, but on all impressions. “Just knowing that Stressticles exists, or even that the Testicular Cancer Foundation exists is a step in the right direction,” he notes. “If someone takes the additional steps to order one and put it together – to walk the path that we envision for them with the kit – that would be great.”

The TCF is now 16 years old, and the group says that 10,000 males will be diagnosed with testicular cancer in the U.S. this year, and rates are rising.