Brand background: IAPC’s ‘Last Words’ campaign in 2016 built awareness on palliative care but there was an opportunity to further drive palliative care access from 1% in 2015. Cultural Background: Talking about death is taboo in India. Problem: Even the terminally ill and their families or doctors don’t discuss death. Let alone use palliative care to make the last days comfortable. In fact, the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2015 ranked India's end-of-life care last among 40 countries, giving a score of 2/5 in public awareness, attributing it partly to reluctance to openly discuss death.

Objective: To increase palliative care access by breaking the taboo on discussing death.

Challenges: 1. Difficult to break an ingrained cultural taboo. 2. Low budgets, needing to rely on virality, media partnerships and PR–a tough task for a campaign on death. 3. Needed to drive palliative care, not just acceptance of death.

In India, talking about death is taboo. Even doctors don’t discuss death with the terminally ill. Let alone palliative care to make the last days comfortable, leaving patients confused and lonely. To break the taboo, terminally ill

patients performed stand-up comedy shows for doctors, screened and trained by palliative care counselors and India’s best comedians. Thus, demonstrating that palliative care helps patients get comfortable with death. And even joke about it. The recordings of the shows became our film. The film inspired a half-hour television show on India's leading TV news network, a week-long radio special on India's largest radio network, captured the front

pages of India's leading newspapers and even spread globally through 3-minute coverage on BBC World News.

Seeing the terminally ill laugh at death, not just doctors but all Indians questioned our ingrained fear of discussing death, and palliative care truly entered the Indian lexicon.

The biggest execution challenge was working with terminally ill patients. So, palliative care counselors and India’s best comedians screened them and spent weeks with them, converting experiences with death/dying into stand-up comedy. The campaign launched at medical conferences and on social media with an opinion poll establishing the taboo. The video was shared with doctors through micro-targeted Facebook promotion, IAPC’s network of doctor associations, and doctor groups on Facebook/ WhatsApp (India’s #1 messaging app), reaching over 80% Indian doctors. Medical opinion leaders supported the campaign. A UGC campaign ensured doctors shared stories of their terminally ill patients. Followed by India’s first Facebook 360 Live show for doctors, with the terminally ill comics inspiring doctors and palliative care counselors training doctors to discuss death with patients. The website

provided more detailed training. Amplification through mass media partnerships and PR ensured the campaign reached consumers and generated buzz with doctors too.