In 1949, Gilmore Schjeldahl invented barf bags for Northwest Orient Airlines. Oddly enough, in the exact same year, a genuine scientific and medicinal innovation emerged: Dramamine, an over-the-counter medication for nausea. As 2024 marked the joint 75th anniversary for both the brand and the barf bag, we couldn’t help but notice that Dramamine was thriving while barf bags were dying. Underused and underappreciated, barf bags—along with their admiring collectors, community and industry—fell victim to the success of the brand. That made us think: What if we reminded the world how effective Dramamine is by saying goodbye to the industry we are accidentally killing?

Dramamine, the #1 anti-nausea brand in the US, is so effective at preventing nausea that it ended the need for barf bags. That made us think: What if we reminded the world how effective Dramamine is by saying goodbye to the industry we are accidentally killing? So we set out to pay tribute to the very thing we were killing with an entire campaign to say goodbye to the barf bag. We launched with a documentary feature short titled “The Last Barf Bag: A Tribute to a Cultural Icon”, a film that celebrates every corner of the barf bag universe. With whimsy and curiosity, the documentary explores the unique subculture of barf bag enthusiasts, putting barf bags on a pedestal and even imagining a better future for their existence—all to show people the impact and efficacy of Dramamine in an entertaining and unexpected way.

The people most important to Dramamine are those who suffer nausea while traveling. But generic versions of Dramamine were threatening our #1 status. The brand needed to create something that would re-establish Dramamine as the leader in nausea control, and invite our audience to engage with the brand in a memorable, culturally relevant way. To do so, we used the ultimate expression of nausea: the barf bag.

The beautiful writing we found on the barf bag letters was one of the things that inspired the idea to run them as print ads, so the barf bag collectors who sent the letters to Dramamine are officially credited as copywriters for this campaign. We then complemented the earnest tone of the letters with a simple line that gave the brand credit for the letters’ subject matter without overshadowing the writing on the barf bags. In tandem, the passionate writing on the letters draws the viewer in, while the headline off to the side delivers a subtle brand message that reinforces our product’s status as the #1 treatment for motion sickness.

The beautiful writing we found on the barf bag letters was one of the things that inspired the idea to run them as print ads, so the barf bag collectors who sent the letters to Dramamine are officially credited as copywriters for this campaign. We then complemented the earnest tone of the letters with a simple line that gave the brand credit for the letters’ subject matter without overshadowing the writing on the barf bags. In tandem, the passionate writing on the letters draws the viewer in, while the headline off to the side delivers a subtle brand message that reinforces our product’s status as the #1 treatment for motion sickness.