Testicular Cancer Society and FP7 McCann Dubai used YouTube mid-roll ads inside football highlights to teach men testicular self-checks during free kicks in
How Testicular Cancer Society Made Football Highlights a Self-Check Tutorial
Highlight Your Balls is a 2024 awareness campaign by the Testicular Cancer Society, created by FP7 McCann Dubai, that embeds a testicular self-check demonstration inside YouTube football highlight videos by using mid-roll technology to insert an ad in the precise seconds before a free kick is struck — the moment defenders instinctively shield their groins — reaching men in the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and global football audiences simultaneously.
The strategic premise of the campaign begins with an uncomfortable truth. Testicular cancer affects an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 men every year in the United States alone, with approximately one in 250 men developing it at some stage in their lives. Early diagnosis substantially improves survival outcomes, which makes regular self-examination genuinely consequential. Yet conventional self-check instructional videos are widely ignored. Dry, clinical, and tonally mismatched with the habits of younger men, they struggle to earn attention in the first place. The Testicular Cancer Society and FP7 McCann Dubai set out to solve that distribution and engagement problem by placing the self-check message inside content men already seek out voluntarily.
Launched in April 2024 to coincide with Cancer Awareness Month, the campaign operates through YouTube's mid-roll ad format. When a viewer watches a football highlights clip, the ad interrupts playback in the moments immediately before a free kick. Three actors — dressed in the exact shirt and shorts colours of the defending team — appear in a wall formation. The central actor performs a brief self-examination while a voiceover, styled to match the commentary register of that specific league and region, explains the procedure step by step. The ad closes by directing men to the Testicular Cancer Society website before the original highlight resumes. To maximise relevance across markets, the campaign produced voiceover commentary in six languages: German, Italian, Japanese, English, Arabic, and Portuguese — each version placed against highlights from leagues with audiences native to that language.
Football highlights on YouTube command extraordinary voluntary attention from precisely the demographic most at risk from testicular cancer. Testicular cancer is most commonly diagnosed in men aged 15 to 35, a cohort that is both deeply engaged with digital sports content and historically resistant to health communications framed in clinical terms. FP7 McCann Dubai identified this behavioural tension as the central strategic opportunity: the audience was already watching ball-related video content at scale; the challenge was making a self-check demonstration feel native to that context rather than intrusive.
The free-kick wall moment is the mechanism that makes this work strategically rather than merely conceptually. When defenders form a wall, covering their groins is a universal and instinctive action — one that any football viewer recognises immediately. That visual cue creates a moment of coherent, non-disruptive transition between the game footage and the health message. The campaign does not ask men to seek out a self-check video; it intercepts them inside content they have actively chosen, at a moment when the subject of male anatomy is already visually present on screen.
Within the men's health awareness landscape, the Testicular Cancer Society operates alongside significantly larger organisations. Movember, the most prominent global men's health fundraising movement, raised £69.8 million globally in 2024 across 20 countries, according to Uk Movember, and allocated 78.9 percent of that fundraising to men's health programmes, according to uk.movember.com. Against that scale of reach and resource, a mid-roll YouTube execution represents a precision media strategy: instead of competing for share of voice in November's crowded awareness calendar, the Testicular Cancer Society inserts its message year-round into content consumed continuously, at the moment within that content where the message is most contextually credible. The multi-language execution — covering Arabic for UAE audiences and English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese for broader markets — reflects a deliberate effort to reach men in the United States and across the United Arab Emirates within their own media and linguistic contexts.
Paulo Engler, Senior Creative Director at FP7 McCann Dubai, articulated the creative logic at the heart of the execution. Engler stated: "We would use that moment to talk about how men can protect their testicles — not only during the game, but also during their lives." The free-kick wall is not simply a visual metaphor; it is a functional editorial cut point. The mid-roll technology is deployed so that the ad appears at precisely the instant when the wall forms, meaning the transition from real match footage to the campaign's staged footage is experienced as continuous action rather than an interruption.
The production craft required to sustain that illusion is considerable. Costume design for each language version was matched to the specific team colours appearing in the highlights clip the ad would accompany, so that the three actors standing in the wall read visually as part of the same game. The camera framing centres on the groin of the middle actor, isolating the self-examination movement without contextual noise. The voiceover performance across all six language versions — German, Italian, Japanese, English, Arabic, and Portuguese — was produced to replicate not only the language but the specific cadence, energy level, and register of match commentary in each football culture. An Arabic-language voiceover performing to the rhythm of a Middle Eastern commentary style anchors the campaign's relevance in the United Arab Emirates; an English-language version does the same for the US market and English-speaking football audiences globally.
This campaign follows a lineage of inventive executions from the same client-agency relationship. The 2022 campaign Wall Street Balls used social listening to identify and engage with posts about the Charging Bull sculpture's testicles, reaching over two million people across 21 countries with more than 25,000 unique comments and generating approximately $110,000 in earned media value with zero paid media spend, according to mccannbirmingham.co.uk. Highlight Your Balls represents an evolution in production scale and media investment, moving from reactive social content to a pre-planned, multi-language, platform-native media buy. Production credits beyond Paulo Engler's creative direction are not fully documented in publicly available sources.
Highlight Your Balls generated 42 million impressions, according to mwcannes.com and mmm-online.com. The Testicular Cancer Society website recorded a 45 percent increase in visits following the campaign's launch, according to mwcannes.com. A 30 percent increase in a further performance metric was reported by the same source, though the full description of that metric is not completely documented in publicly available materials.
The campaign's award record provides a secondary measure of industry validation. Cannes Lions awarded Highlight Your Balls a Silver Lion in the Brand Experience and Activation category in 2024, according to mwcannes.com. Dubai Lynx awarded the campaign its Grand Prix for Good in 2025, according to campaignme.com. The New York Festivals Advertising Awards recognised the work with a Bronze in Sports: Best Use of Real-Time Response, according to mccannbirmingham.co.uk. Media Week Awards presented both Bronze and Silver recognition, according to mediaweekawards.co.uk. The Drum Awards granted a Gold, according to mediaweekawards.co.uk. Across award programmes, the campaign accumulated 14 shortlists.
Mike Craycraft, Founder of the Testicular Cancer Society, addressed the campaign's effectiveness directly in CURE on April 30, 2024: "This campaign is a great example of how the clever use of the latest digital tools can blur the line between video content and messaging. The result is a fun and engaging way to teach men how to perform a short and simple self-check, that might just save their life." The structural effectiveness of the campaign rests on context-matching: by placing a health message inside content the target audience has actively chosen, at a moment when the subject is already visually present, the work removes the primary barriers — avoidance and disengagement — that make most testicular cancer self-check communications ineffective. Clapboard rates Highlight Your Balls 79 out of 100.
Highlight Your Balls is a 2024 men's health campaign created by FP7 McCann Dubai for the Testicular Cancer Society. It uses YouTube mid-roll technology to insert a testicular self-check demonstration into football highlight videos at the moment defenders form a free-kick wall, targeting men in the United States and the United Arab Emirates across six languages.
FP7 McCann Dubai deployed YouTube's mid-roll ad format to interrupt football highlights precisely before a free kick. Actors dressed in matching team colours performed a self-check in a defensive wall formation, with voiceover commentary produced in German, Italian, Japanese, English, Arabic, and Portuguese to match each league's regional audience.
Highlight Your Balls generated 42 million impressions, according to mwcannes.com. The Testicular Cancer Society website recorded a 45 percent increase in visits, according to the same source. The campaign also earned a Cannes Lions Silver Lion in Brand Experience and Activation and a Dubai Lynx Grand Prix for Good in 2025, according to campaignme.com.
Testicular cancer most commonly affects men aged 15 to 35, a demographic that watches football highlights on YouTube in large numbers. The free-kick wall moment — when defenders instinctively shield their groins — provided a contextually credible, non-disruptive entry point for a self-check demonstration, making the health message feel native rather than intrusive.
Cannes Lions awarded Highlight Your Balls a Silver Lion in Brand Experience and Activation in 2024, according to mwcannes.com. Dubai Lynx awarded the campaign a Grand Prix for Good in 2025, according to campaignme.com. The campaign also received a New York Festivals Bronze, Media Week Awards Bronze and Silver, a Drum Awards Gold, and 14 shortlists across award programmes.
Wall Street Balls, launched in October 2022, used social listening to engage with posts about the Charging Bull sculpture, reaching over two million people across 21 countries and generating approximately $110,000 in earned media with no paid spend, according to mccannbirmingham.co.uk. Highlight Your Balls scaled that creative approach into a multi-language, platform-native paid media campaign reaching 42 million impressions, according to mwcannes.com.
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