Published on
June 17, 2024
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Welcome to the Breakdown, a weekly roundup of the best real-life marketing examples, created for marketers and agency folk that want to create work that actually works.
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In this Breakdown, we're looking at ✨ the serious stuff ✨ - it’s “easy” to make great, creative work about things that people love, or find funny. But how do you invite yourself into people’s homes and onto their screens when you want to talk about something they’re afraid of, or that makes them sad or angry?
I recently saw a post on LinkedIn that claimed your ad is effective if people appreciate seeing it on your feed. One of those posts designed to harvest up bots, and those accounts that are still replying with AI-generated affirmations. Being naturally cynical and non-believing of most of what is said on that platform, I wanted to show that you don’t need to make ads that look like content people want to see. In fact, you can do the opposite and still make some incredible work…
Hard hitting murals describe the football fans who won’t be watching the Euros this summer.
While most every other brand is latching on to the Euros and associated football fever as a positive, feel-good force, BHF have turned its power into something much more heartfelt.
The campaign, ‘Til I Died’, is composed of 12 hand-painted murals of young football fans who passed away, and who won’t be watching their nations compete this year. They are 12 of the 13 babies born each day with a heart defect in the UK, on whose behalf BHF raises funds and carries out research.
The murals have been placed in the young people’s own cities and towns, featuring the eye-catching line ‘Till I Died’, and each of their stories.
I wrote at length last time about the power sports has for marketing, and this campaign draws on those sports heart strings and boot laces once more. It’s a beautifully simple campaign, designed to get people to think differently about heart disease. It’s not just the old or overweight amongst us who need to have their heart on their radar - it’s all of us. What really gets me is the media placements themselves. Murals are something a bit special in football. They mean something. They represent the community that football breathes and creates. These kids were part of that community.
It’s not a campaign, I think, that makes for many learnings or ‘key takeaways’. As a rule, I find that stuff that is this honest and simple doesn’t really translate well into generalities.
The charity offer a warmer take on similarly heavy material and messaging.
In the first of the two ads in this campaign, a small child, Layla, introduces herself to her grandfather. She explains that she hasn’t been born yet, but will be in four years. They will be like peas in a pod, listening to 70s soul, and watching Crystal Palace lose together. But he needs to be around to do any of that. Which means getting checked for prostate cancer. It affects 1 in 8 men, and because they’re black his risk is double.
The second ad follows a similar pattern, with a BBQ telling a man that he will get the grill on his 60th birthday, but that he needs to get himself checked to ensure he’ll be around to receive it.
I suppose the simplest difference, conceptually, between this work and the BHF work, is the timeline. BHF look at what the world has lost, this campaign looks at what the world could lose. Both are heartfelt and touching, but the hypothetical nature of this work means it naturally feels somehow a bit lighter. It’s not euphemisms and fake optimism, but it’s reality. Just go and get checked out, there’s lots to look forward to.
The actual difference, I think, is what each ad is asking for. Prostate Cancer UK want men to go and get themselves checked out. BHF want people to donate to their cause. They need to elicit different emotions, and do so in different ways. Fear, grief and guilt can be powerful, but can also be astringent and make people want to turn away or ignore. Both of these campaigns handle their own emotional impact well. BHF don’t hide from what they’re saying, because they want to celebrate and respect those kids in order to earn donations. Prostate Cancer UK wrap their story up in a little bit of wool, because they need men to listen and care about this.
A similar challenge to BHF, met with even more simplicity.
Like BHF, Coppafeel were staring down a perception problem. Like BHF, it was a problem to do with age. Only a third of young people thought that breast cancer could affect them and people their age. Two thirds thought it was something that happened to older women.
So the brand needed to change this perception. It recruited three people, three young voices to spearhead the change. These were three women who suffered from breast cancer, and who through the magic of TikTok filters, made themselves look older.
“I thought someone with breast cancer looked like this.” The line goes in their respective TikToks and in the OOH work accompanying the campaign. “But I’m only 21”. Or 22, or 24, depending on the woman speaking.
I mean, it’s simple work at its heart, right? Like all of the work here in this Breakdown. It’s intuitive, and perhaps so intuitive that it’s barely worth saying, but simplicity of thought seems to be common to serious work. Clever ‘creative strategy’ doesn’t really have a place here. Sometimes all you really need to do is remind people of what’s important, and get them to care about it for a little while after they’ve seen your ad. Simplicity is far more brutal when the topic matter is this serious.