This Sunday, our new national advertising campaign gets its first airing. You can see a sneak preview of it here:

The ad is our first national television campaign to feature cancer patients and survivors, and focuses on the emotions and realities of being given a cancer diagnosis.

We’re really keen to hear what you think about it. So please let us know by leaving your comments at the bottom of this post.

About the campaign

The campaign aims to raise awareness about cancer and the work we do to prevent and treat it, and to help us raise funds to keep our vital support flowing to the researchers who need it.

To achieve this, the ad highlights two key facts.

Progress

The first is that we’ve come a long way. As we announced today, mortality rates for breast, bowel, and male lung cancer are at their lowest since 1971.

More than nine out of ten men with testicular cancer are now effectively cured.

And now more than three quarters of children with cancer survive, compared with only a quarter back in the 60s.

That’s despite the fact that more than 100,000 people are now diagnosed with these kinds of cancers every year.

This improvement has been possible thanks in no small part to the efforts of the thousands of cancer researchers and doctors who have dedicated their lives to beating the disease. Scientific research into cancer does make a difference – and Cancer Research UK is proud to be leading the way in the fight to beat cancer.

A long way still to go

But the second fact we want to highlight is that there’s still a very long way to go. For an increasing number of people, a diagnosis of cancer is no longer a death sentence – but more than 155,000 people still lose their lives to the disease every year in the UK alone.

Some types of cancer – for example pancreatic and oesophageal cancers – have seen very little improvement in survival compared to others. Others, like ovarian cancer, are too often diagnosed too late for treatment to be effective.

So we need your support to help us continue our vital work, and to build on the progress we’ve already seen.

Tell us what you think

Cancer is, and probably always will be, a highly emotive issue. Given how many people – and families – it affects, how could it not be?

So we really want you to let us know what you think about the new campaign on this blog. Our Director of Brand and PR, Carolan Davidge, will personally respond to any queries you raise over the next few weeks.

Your feedback is so valuable to us in shaping the way we communicate and discuss cancer – another vital part of our ongoing work to beat the disease.

Henry