The creative idea was called ‘heart disease can kill when you least expect it’. The idea was to puncture people’s complacency around heart disease with what felt like a one-to-one message that was speaking directly to the reader or viewer, telling them that heart disease could kill them there and then in that moment and asking them to consider the devastating consequences. The idea involved creative and media working in partnership, to create a suite of contextually relevant executions. Executions that would draw people into reading them by tapping into their situation and psyche, before delivering an unexpected message about heart disease - one that then resolved by offering up hope through BHF’s life saving research.

All executions were long copy executions that followed a consistent and bold visual style, designed to draw people into reading the full story. This visual style was applied to a number of different ambient media placements, from your more traditional OOH spots like bus shelter 6s, crosstrack 48s and tube card panels, to some more innovative ambient placements such as coffee cups, back of cinema tickets, taxi seat flips and toilet mirror clings. All based on the strategy of disrupting routines or mindsets. The campaign culminated in a media first partnership with the Sun, that involved ads being written live to the editorial of the newspaper, the evening before going to press.

BHF’s top of mind awareness increased from 37% to 39% over the campaign period –whilst not a huge increase on its own, it is made more significant by the fact that most competitors saw significant decreases over the same period – Cancer Research UK and Macmillan saw decreases of 14% and 9% respectively (N.B. spontaneous, top of mind awareness is a strong proxy for propensity to donate to the BHF). The campaign has also helped contribute to BHF’s strongest consideration score since 2014, improving from 30.0 in January, to 32.5 in April, whilst driving high levels of social commentary. Longer term, this campaign is the second iteration of what has been a 2 year brand strategy – one that has seen heart disease move from 10th to 4th on the list of health concerns people are most worried about in the UK (PHE's ‘Public awareness and opinion survey')