HEALTH WARNING
We are no longer updating our Covid-19 hub regularly. That includes this page. Follow the link below for the latest.
HEALTH WARNING
We are no longer updating our Covid-19 hub regularly. That includes this page. Click here for the latest.
The Covid-19 Creative Challenge
Can you come up with effective messaging to communicate the truth about covid-19 to men?
What is it with men? The latest gender data suggests that men are twice as likely to die of Covid-19 as women. Yet it also seems that we haven’t a clue about how the virus works.
One man in four think it’s ‘just like the flu’ (compared to just one woman in 10) and men are twice as likely as women to think it only affects older people or those with underlying health conditions. Both views are seriously mistaken. Men are also five times more likely to disbelieve the government’s advice on staying home and generally wash their hands far less. What a mess.
So the Men’s Health Forum has challenged the UK top advertising agencies and indeed everyone with a creative streak to come up with some Covid-19 messaging targeted specifically at men. It’s the perfect challenge for anyone creative working from home…
Talk to men directly
Men’s Health Forum CEO Martin Tod said:
the facts on Covid-19 are clearly not reaching as many men as we would like. That’s not surprising to us. The official public health messages online and in the media are generic and don’t talk to men directly despite the fact that being male is clearly a risk factor - just as being over 70 or being overweight or having underlying conditions are risk factors.
The Forum have been campaigning since the start of the epidemic for government to provide the daily data on Covid-19 broken down by gender and age. This is still not happening.
The Forum hope that some imaginative social media shares from the UK’s top creatives will help to put gender on the agenda in the discussion of Covid-19 and, even more importantly, help men to understand what’s going on with this virus and why social distancing matters. Let's talk.
Tweet your ideas to @menshealthforum
#covidchallenge4men
The full brief is below. To get the ball rolling, we had a go ourselves. (See our video after the brief.)
Covid-19 and men - the creative brief
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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