In a cheeky display of internet ingenuity, the Canadian Lung Association is amplifying its message by hijacking a habit familiar to anyone who’s spent time in social-media comments: being first.

Developed with Halifax-based agency Wunder, the “It Pays to Be Early” campaign promotes the importance of early lung cancer detection. It taps into the urge among a certain set of online commenters to be first to respond to posts with messages like “First!” or “It feels illegal to be this early.”

To land those top comments, Wunder scraped data from some of the internet’s most-followed pages to pinpoint the perfect moment to post, according to the agency.

Through trial, error and perseverance, the Canadian Lung Association’s official socials managed to get in first on posts from accounts with a combined 670 million followers and land more than 200 “first” messages in high-traffic comment sections.

Wunder creative director Stephen Flynn tells strategy that the commenting process ran from early June to July 15.

“We scraped all of the post data on our target pages to identify any key posting patterns that would narrow our stakeout time to windows of 15-20 minutes,” Flynn says. “Once we had those, we would just go page to page and patiently wait, refreshing every couple seconds until a new post arrived, at which point it was a mad dash to the comments, just like everyone else.”

Highlights included comments like, “FIRST! It pays to be early, especially with lung cancer. Learn the symptoms for early detection, visit lung.ca” for an Edmonton Oilers post during the Stanley Cup final and “FIRST! Being early could save your life” after the launch Dakota Johnson’s recent Hot Ones episode.

Through the campaign, the Canadian Lung Association arrived first on posts by The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon (19 million followers), the Food Network (32 million followers) and ESPN (54 million followers), among others.

Flynn says there was no “Aha” moment of inspiration for the campaign concept, only that Wunder and the Canadian Lung Association knew they wanted to show up with their message in an unexpected way.

“We first spent some time ideating around the space of surprising people when they’re somewhere in the real world, for example lining up somewhere,” Flynn says. “And then eventually it clicked that, around the clock on social media, there are people that are racing to be first, or at the very least ‘early.’ We kind of became colleagues with them throughout this campaign, and they respected how frequently we were showing up in that first spot.”

The effort is part of a broader push to educate Canadians about the risks of lung cancer and the importance of recognizing symptoms early. The disease is the leading cause of cancer-related death in Canada, largely because most cases are not diagnosed till Stage 3 or Stage 4, according to the organization.

Flynn says the spend for the campaign, which was sponsored by biopharmaceutical company Merck Canada, was relatively low because most of the budget went into the time required to stake out pages and get in the first post.

The Canadian Lung Association regularly receives funding and sponsorships from organizations, Flynn says, so the Merck agreement came before the brief and pitches had to fit into that monetary framework.