With the annual March Madness basketball tournament and Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month both taking place this month, Exact Sciences is squaring up for a slam dunk of an educational campaign.
The company—which makes the popular Cologuard at-home colon cancer screening test—has teamed up with the Blue Hat Foundation, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to providing educational materials about the disease and free screening to minority and medically underserved communities. Together, they launched a campaign this week dubbed “Box Out Colon Cancer” and aimed at encouraging everyone aged 45 and older to undergo regular screening.
The campaign is helmed by Jamal “Monster Mash” Mashburn, who helped lead the University of Kentucky to the semifinals of the March Madness tournament in 1993, after which he was drafted to the NBA for a professional career that ultimately lasted 12 seasons. Mashburn also has a direct tie to colorectal cancer, as his mother was diagnosed with the disease during his time on the court.
The “iconic” former player “has a lot of passion around getting people to get screened,” according to Jaime LaMontagne, Exact Sciences’ chief marketing officer, and will be challenging some of the nation’s top college basketball coaches to undergo screening.
And regular screening has perhaps never been more important. As LaMontagne noted in an interview, “Colon cancer still is the nation’s number two cancer-related killer. It affects people of all races and genders and ethnicities. … And it’s on a rise at really alarming rates among adults under the age of 50.”
But the disease is also “one of the most treatable when it’s caught early,” she said. “It’s one of those where, if you get screened every year, every three years, you’ll be able to get ahead of it and get the right treatment.”
In their joint attempt to boost screening rates, Exact Sciences and the Blue Hat Foundation will be implementing a full-court press, combining the “media blitz” of the Box Out Colon Cancer educational campaign with Blue Hat’s “Screening Madness” initiative, which LaMontagne described as a “blend of sports visuals with vital health information targeting at-risk communities, and specifically young adults and African-American men.”
Reaching those at-risk communities is a key aim behind the Box Out Colon Cancer project, since “African-Americans are 20% more likely to develop colon cancer, and they’re 40% more likely to die from it,” LaMontagne said, adding, “We really want to get to this African American community, we want to get to this younger demographic, to really start to make an impact on those two very disturbing statistics.”
In comparison to the branded “GoGo Cologuard” campaign that Exact Sciences also launched this month, Box Out Colon Cancer “is meant to be a generic campaign,” per LaMontagne, with the company paying close attention to impressions on the campaign’s website and how people engage with the content on the site.
“We’re also going to be seeing how general awareness goes up on colorectal cancer, driving people to screen through the Box Out Colon Cancer website, and then, obviously, complementing that with our own Cologuard campaigns throughout the month, too,” she said.
Balancing a mix of “complementary” branded and unbranded campaigns is a deliberate move on Exact Sciences’ part, per LaMontagne, to first raise awareness about the need for early cancer screening before ushering those newly educated individuals toward the company’s own screening kits.
“We always have this debate about how much you want to drive larger market awareness versus your specific product,” she said. “There are 60 million people in the United States that need to get screened for colon cancer, and so our view is very much: We have to get people aware that 45-year-olds and above need to get screened. That is priority number one; that fits our mission around eradicating cancer. And then, obviously, we would love for them to try Cologuard.”