A 5-year national campaign that put young adults with cancer back on the map.
From 2010 to 2016, I served as Chief Operating Officer at Stupid Cancer, where I led marketing, partnerships, and field execution and collaborated with our team on this campaign - the one I’m proudest of. Five annual tours that grew with each year, from a 10-day, 10-city launch in 2012 to a 14-day, 14-city run by 2016. A different car every year, courtesy of a different automaker. Every trip ended at the OMG! Cancer Summit (later renamed CancerCon). All of it earned, none of it paid.
It started with one car, one tank of gas, and a hunch.
“Young adults with cancer were the most isolated patient population in oncology. We set out to fix that - in person.”
I joined Stupid Cancer in 2010 to help build a national presence for a community that, at the time, barely had a name in clinical literature, let alone a seat at the table. The Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) oncology population was an afterthought - old enough to age out of pediatrics, young enough to feel invisible inside adult oncology. The Road Trip was our answer.
In 2012 we landed our launch partnership with Volkswagen, who handed over the keys to a 2012 Beetle Turbo and a modest fuel budget. The format was simple: 10 days on the road, a meet-up in a different American city most nights, NYC to Las Vegas, landing at the 5th Annual OMG! Cancer Summit - the gathering Stupid Cancer was already running for the AYA oncology community. We covered 4,500 miles that first year. Coffee shops. Breweries. Rooftops. No name tags, no fundraising ask, just people who’d been through the worst version of their twenties finally meeting each other face-to-face.
From 2012 to 2016 we ran the tour every spring, and every year we drove a different car with a different automaker partner. The format grew with us - 10 cities in 2012, all the way to 14 cities and 6,000 miles by 2016, with the conference itself rebranding from the OMG! Cancer Summit to CancerCon along the way. Every route was engineered to funnel attendees toward the Summit at the end. A steadily growing earned-media footprint that I designed, pitched, and executed alongside our PR team. By the fifth and final tour, Buffalo Rising was calling it “The 5th Annual Stupid Cancer Road Trip” like it had always existed, and PRWeb was wiring out “14-City Road Trip and Annual Oncology Conference CancerCon” as the official headline. All told, the five tours covered roughly 26,000 ground miles - the equivalent of driving coast-to-coast more than eight times.
“The Long Road to Las Vegas was never really about the destination. It was about the people you find when you stop pretending you’re fine.” - Kenny Kane, HuffPost (2013)
The press strategy was layered: PR Newswire and PRWeb wired the national announcement out of New York. I authored a first-person essay for HuffPost the same year. As the route hit each city, we pre-pitched local TV - Fox 13 in Salt Lake City, CBS 8 in San Diego, CBS 58 in Milwaukee, KPTV Fox 12 in Oregon, KTVQ in Montana - and they sent crews to the meet-ups. City and culture press from Buffalo Rising to the Anchorage Press to Happening Magazine picked it up organically. Empower Radio aired a full interview. 3BL Media and POPSOP covered the brand partnership angle. Almost all of it was earned, not paid.
A different car every year. A different automaker every year.
Each tour was anchored by a new vehicle partnership. Volkswagen launched it. Chevy carried it home.
Five tours. Every region of the country.
Each tour was structured around the calendar of the OMG! Cancer Summit / CancerCon - working backward from the conference date to engineer a route that funneled survivors and caregivers toward the final stop. The full mapped routes are below, organized by year.
Coverage the campaign earned, still live a decade later.
These are the press citations that survived a decade of link rot and still link back to stupidcancerroadtrip.org today. Sorted by domain authority. Every URL below was manually verified live before publishing.
Methodology: backlink data pulled from Ahrefs (site-explorer / referring-domains) for stupidcancerroadtrip.org on May 26, 2026. Spam and SEO directory domains were filtered out, and every URL above was manually verified live. Coverage from outlets like CBS 8 San Diego, CBS 58 Milwaukee, KPTV Fox 12 Oregon, KTVQ Montana, Bio-Medicine, Empower Radio, POPSOP, 3BL Media, Money.ca, Anchorage Press, and Happening Magazine appears in the referring-domains report at the domain level, but the original article URLs are no longer accessible a decade later.
Three things this campaign taught me that I’ve carried into every role since.
Earned media beats paid media when the story is real.
We spent zero dollars on placement. Every outlet on this page reached out, was pitched cold, or covered the meet-up after we showed up in their city. The narrative did the work.
Field execution is the brand.
A national press hit means nothing if the local meet-up is empty. We treated every city stop like a product launch - venue, timing, local outreach, follow-up.
Underserved populations deserve campaigns, not pity.
AYA cancer patients didn’t need another awareness ribbon. They needed a reason to be in the same room. The Road Trip was that reason for five straight years.