Like anyone would be, we were shocked to find out that America is THE most dangerous industrialized nation to have a baby in. This year, 700 new moms will die in childbirth and over 50,000 will suffer life-threatening complications due to pregnancy, with women of color suffering at a rate 3x higher.
And it’s only getting worse.
We needed a way to jolt people into demanding their representatives in Congress enact an agenda to turn this completely solvable crisis around. Upon realizing that there’s hardly anything more iconic than the receiving blankets babies get when they’re born - who hasn’t seen these blankets wrapping up newborn babies throughout their social media feeds? - we printed harrowing statistics on 700 of these blankets, one for each dying mother, and staged an installation at the National Mall to launch our #BlanketChange campaign. People were shocked into learning the truth about what’s happening with these new moms, and that a quick message to their representative could help make a big difference. The event was a stunning success, and we look forward to seeing real change in the upcoming years in the U.S. maternal death rate.
Shorty Award Finalist
Pfizer approached us to work on their Get Old campaign, hoping we could turn a subject as dreaded as aging into one that could be not only educational, but fun and interesting as well. “Good luck!” everybody laughed at us, as though this was a thankless, soul-sucking task…which, at the time, it was.
But we jumped at the chance, using every opportunity to add energy into the mix when explaining to people that no, aging is not the same thing as dying – as a matter of fact, if you take care of themselves now, those "Golden Years" could actually be some of your best ones. We created the campaign "FOGO (Fear of Getting Old), urging people to stop being scared of aging and to embrace it instead. We built out Get Old’s website, kicking things off with a humorous "Buzzfeed-style" quiz people could take to reveal how they're aging, and then to remind them it’s not too late to turn things around for the better.
The quiz turned out to be remarkably successful, overachieving in social engagement and launching a supportive online community that was reminded every day to let go of their FOGO.
Pfizer then went further to push awareness by wrapping "FOGO-isms" we’d created around their headquarters in New York City, bringing FOGO directly to people’s faces. Additionally, we created a series of (adorable!) videos featuring kids so viewers could see what getting old looks like to “the experts.”
Find out how YOU'RE aging with the FOGO quiz.
Featured in:
Cause-Related Campaign of the Year Finalist 2015.
Cause-Related Campaign of the Year Finalist 2016.
Pfizer asked the question, “what happens when you put two different versions of ‘seniors’ into an office and have them work together?” We decided to find out, and thanks to a great group of kids and the almost-comically-too-perfect-what-the-heck-is-he-from-central-casting? 70 year-old Paul, we found the answer to be, “really, really good things.”
The big takeaway was that older seniors can still not only be productive parts of a team, but leaders as well. Paul learned from the kids, they learned from him, everybody laughed, everybody cried, there’s probably a folk song about them out there somewhere. Okay maybe nobody cried, but the video did show that being retired doesn’t mean you have to sit around in your armchair watching “Newhart” all day…although as I’m typing this that sounds absolutely delightful, if I’m being honest.
Personally, I’d love to see a “Where are they now?” piece somewhere down the line, as both sets of seniors surely will never forget one another and what they each learned.
Winner: 2017 Webby Awards - Corporate Social Responsibility (Branded Video)
Featured in Fast Company.
Who doesn’t love Thanksgiving? The sausage stuffing. The mashed potatoes. The incredibly awkward conversations with family members you see once a year whose daily Facebook posts make you wonder if you’ve moved far enough away.
Wait, what?
Pfizer came to us looking for a way to get families talking about their family medical history, a very important part in maintaining one’s own health. With Thanksgiving and its potential awkward family conversations approaching, we decided to take advantage of those moments and turn them into opportunities for relatives to ask real questions. Do we have a history of heart disease? High cholesterol, diabetes? If you’re forced to talk to each other anyway, why not make it about family health instead of, say, that brilliant cousin half your age who’s about to be named Ambassador to the UN (IF she deigns to accept!)
It was a lot of fun to fun to work with such an iconic holiday and family archetypes. But even better was seeing the finished product and knowing we’d done our best to try and help people get old juuuuuust a little bit better.
Both Huge and Gallaudet University, a private institution for the deaf and hard of hearing, are just a few blocks from busy Union Market. Noticing that the interactions between people with hearing difficulties and those without could sometimes be difficult, we wanted to create a way to make this process much easier. This is how Speak2Sign came to be.
The app shows users how to communicate in sign language if needed while purchasing items at Union Market. They can then download a more exhaustive app to learn even more about sign language. Interacting with people from Gallaudet ourselves every day, we were proud to have developed this project, and look forward to Speak2Sign reaching beyond Union Market in the coming years.
Social connections can be harder to come by as we age, and losing them may be detrimental to our health. Meanwhile, society has a way of trying to define what those meaningful relationships can be - but luckily, we found companionship comes in many forms, and from unexpected places.
We teamed up with Good Fight Media to share the story of 95 year-old Pat, who lost his beloved wife of many decades. Worried he might expire from loneliness, Pat’s neighbor Jeff reached out to him, beginning what would quickly become a close friendship. With studies showing that forming these social connections can make you not only happier, but healthier, it’s hard not to be inspired by Pat and Jeff.
And we can pretty much guarantee these two are looking forward to another fishing season together next year…with Pat, and ONLY Pat, as Captain of the Lively Lady, of course.
Everybody knows that Audi is the luxury vehicle of choice for none other than Iron Man himself. So to coincide with the release of “Iron Man 3”, we teamed up with Marvel Comics to create an interactive experience for both Audi and Marvel fans called “Steer the Story.”
Every few days, we’d ask the Audi social community to choose what happened next in Iron Man’s epic battle against Blizzard. Their choices culminated with—in true superhero fashion—a climactic battle royalé of fan participation in which users got to draw/photograph/create the final scene themselves. Finally, one lucky winner was chosen to have his drawing recreated by actual Marvel Comics artists.
The month-long campaign received 28 million impressions on Facebook and Twitter and generated more than 4,500 organic conversations. Initially limited to North America, “Steer the Story” was so successful that Audi green-lit it worldwide. Shortly after, Luxury Daily named it one of the top digital brand campaigns of 2013.
Obviously, we’re looking forward to doing it all over again someday for “Iron Man 53.”
We quickly learned that people with an Audi love two things: their Audi, and where there Audi lives.
So we put the word out for owners to post pictures of their Audis, using the hashtag #50StatesofAudi and indicating where they live. What we thought would be a quick, fun little social play turned into an extended campaign thanks to a blizzard of thousands of submitted photos, which garnered fantastic personal engagement over its initial 12-month duration. Brand enthusiasts got to share their pride and passion for their cars, and we got to have fun with state facts. Each time we posted a new one, we’d get deluded with new photos from fellow owners.
It’s possible people still submit today…to be honest, as the person who was initially responsible for curating them, I’m scared to look.
We continued to create smaller projects for Get Old, such as the Life Forecast. This lets people input data about themselves and the things they love to do (go to the movies, read books, etc.), to see how many times they may get to enjoy those things throughout the rest of their lives…IF they keep doing the right things NOW in order to stay healthy.
See what your own future could look like with the Life Forecast.
Most of all, we liked to jump on holidays for opportunities to soften the daily message of “GET OLD BETTER OR YOU’LL DIE A MISERABLE DEATH!!!” These included our Valentine’s Day Healthy Date ideas and, of course, Christmas.
Under Armour invited us to take part in their ongoing national domination of youth sports, to which we happily agreed. We delivered by creating in-store displays featuring their latest shoes for the 8-12 y.o. market, purely to provoke those very kids into wearing their parents down in real time so they’d buy them. One shoe featured speed (Splitspeed!), and the other power (Mainshock!).
Unfortunately our project was done before we could work with the celebrity talent, so I never got to meet the Rock. This is, as history will surely one day reveal, his loss.
NBCUniversal wanted to demonstrate their ability to provide premium content, world-class talent under one umbrella: ALL TOGETHER. DIFFERENT. So we found a clever way to portray their vastly disparate shows as meaning different things to different people - that folding chair may be a seat for you to sit in and watch “Mr. Robot”, but for a wrestler on WWE’s “Smackdown” it’s a weapon. All of which is intended to remind advertisers that all these different types of shows were part of one large NBCU family.
Our creations would be presented at their Upfront space in New York City in various forms such as print, digital, OOH and experiential marketing.
In early 2017 the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) was looking for a way to spread the word about safety via buckling up on social platforms, and came to us for help. We quickly saw that people were using #ClickItOrTicket when jokingly posting photos of inanimate objects buckled safely in their cars. We decided to tap into this existing behavior to incorporate our message that yes, your pizza is precious cargo - but you are too, so don’t forget to take a second and #ClickLove by buckling yourself up. We used both proactive and reactive social strategies to generate an ongoing conversation throughout NHTSA’s nationwide community, who greatly enjoyed challenging other people to buckle up more and more absurd objects. It turns out that sometimes, showcasing the absurd can be what saves lives.
Toronto’s Nike Crown League is an elite group of basketball teams who meet in the summer to make their presence on the city felt with a vengeance. They came to us looking for a consistant way to pump some excitement into the city during its run. First we revamped their website, and then worked fans into a frenzy on social media by pitting the teams against each other, demanding they fight to the finish and “Claim Royalty”. By personalizing the players online and providing timely, exciting social media, we more than doubled their Twitter followers to just under 30K in mere weeks.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I have received no free shoes from Nike, and, frankly, I don’t think they’ve been taking my repeated phone calls requesting them as seriously as I’d like.
