The Queensland, Australia, health department wanted to run a campaign tackling the ever-increasing issue of obesity. But they needed it to work for everyone, not just people who were already obese – for healthy and unhealthy people alike.
A traditional obesity campaign was out of the question as it would alienate one of the groups. It needed to be something every member of society could relate to – a benchmark that everyone understood. That benchmark was age. Using age meant that you could measure your success against yourself. A calculator was created that focused on personalising the issue by providing an opportunity for individuals to perform an honest assessment of their daily habits. This information was used to calculate a ‘Health and Fitness Age'. Depending on your dietary and lifestyle habits, this Health and Fitness Age could be older or younger than your real age, giving an indication of your current fitness level.
Awareness of the campaign was driven through an integrated campaign including press, television, digital, and social media. The campaign asked people to visit a website to work out what their Health and Fitness Age was. From there, an app helped people lower their Health and Fitness Age using the data from the website. The app meant people could be talked to in this new metric of their Health and Fitness Age rather than the normal measurements of calories, BMI, belly measurements, etc.
More than 60,000 people downloaded the app and 48% said they made healthy changes to their diet and lifestyle through the campaign.
