Clever Blood Donation Ads Illustrate How Transfusions Gave Us Great Cultural Icons

These blood donation ads for the City of Buenos Aires emphasize how giving blood not only saves lives, it gives us the gift of people who would have perished but for transfusions.

The long copy print campaign, by The Community, highlights three cultural icons whose lives were saved by transfusions: Andy Warhol, Stephen King and George Lucas. All the ads feature a biographical story that starts off in black type. But at the point at which the person's life was saved by blood transfusions, the color of the type turns to red. With all three, most of their important work comes after the life-saving moment. The tagline is "Give More Than Just Blood."

"The perception is that it's a painful experience to maybe help someone you don't know, but the reality is that you are not only helping someone, you're also contributing all of the things that those people will do with the rest of their lives to the world," explained The Community co-founder Jose Molla.

The campaign ran in Buenos Aires magazines and newspapers and was designed to reverse the decreasing number of blood donors in the city.