Our brief: to make people more aware of the realities of heart disease. The problem: people are complacent about their hearts very often heart disease goes undetected until it’s too late. Also, we live in an age of the quick fix and an “I’ll deal with it later” attitude prevails. Shock tactics weren’t going to work. So we decided to play along with the “don’t care” mindset and created our own company called cheaphumanhearts4sale.com. At first people were told not to worry about their hearts because they could just buy a new one from us. When they tried to, however, they were told to “get real”.

The campaign was centred around a website, http://www.cheaphumanhearts4sale.com. People were driven to the site by typical cheap and nasty, retail-style elements such as flyers and banners at traffic lights, printed serviettes and lighters were placed in restaurants and bars. On radio and we had cheaply produced “testimonial ads” which were also adapted to be viral emails. Once people arrived on the site any interaction would bring up another page, stamped with the message, “Get Real. You only have one heart, so look after it” They would then automatically be taken to the heart foundation website.