Challenge:
In 2016, the National Safety Council (NSC) had
almost no awareness in the US. They had been so focused on their mission,
eliminating causes of preventable deaths, that they hadn’t been building their
brand. We believed they could save more lives if people knew who they were.
We set out to turn NSC into a recognized brand. We harnessed
a cultural truth — that Americans fear the once-in-a-lifetime deaths, not the
everyday ones more likely to kill them —to establish their new brand platform:
Stop Everyday Killers. In order to build momentum, we launched the platform with
a campaign focused on a deadly, overlooked household killer: prescription
opioids.
Insight:
When
we started this project in early 2017, media coverage of the epidemic was largely
focused on the illegal use of heroin and fentanyl, not prescriptions. But, when the NSC fielded a survey on drug
abuse in the US, it uncovered the reality that prescription opioids can be
found in 3 out of 5 homes in the US and contribute to the deaths of more than
22,000 Americans each year. Yet somehow, Americans didn’t believe they were at
risk—they didn’t think addiction or overdosing could happen to them. The NSC
needed to break through the noise on illegal street opioids with something that
would get Americans to take the threat in their own home seriously.
Idea:
The only way NSC could help stop this everyday
killer was by making the issue unavoidably personal. To humanize the crisis, we
turned data into faces—engraving the faces of the 22,000 moms, dads, sons, and
daughters that die each year from opioid overdoses onto 22,000 pills. These
pills form a powerful installation, “Prescribed to Death,” that tells stories
on an individual level to make people see that victims were just like them,
then uses this relevance to inspire people to protect themselves.
Creative Execution:
The
campaign launched in Chicago with an interactive installation, with the
memorial wall of pills as the focal point. At the installation, a new pill was carved
every 24 minutes, to dramatize how often a person dies of a prescription opioid
overdose. To provide a tangible tool to stop the future devastation of lives,
we created “Warn-Me Labels”—insurance card stickers to prompt conversation with
medical professionals. These labels were provided free of charge along with
safe pill disposal envelopes to all who visited the memorial or inquired
through the website.
The
memorial didn’t conclude in Chicago; it was built to travel, later visiting
cities across the country, including Pittsburgh, Atlanta, D.C., Buffalo, and
soon, Columbus, Ohio.
Results:
“Prescribed
to Death” sparked a national conversation about the prescription opioid problem.
The campaign garnered 2,455,606,809+ earned impressions, 12,990,351+ video
views and a 2,017% increase in shared Facebook impressions.
Through
earned PR, 15+ cities have heard about and asked to host the memorial. The
White House even brought the memorial to Washington, D.C., hosting it on the
National Mall. In a divisive political climate, the memorial united the
country’s major parties, with prominent leaders of both visiting the site.
The
campaign established NSC as a leader in the fight against prescription opioid
overdoses. Conversation about NSC grew by 891% on the days of the memorial launch
and 3663% when the DC memorial was announced.