Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. But it’s a silent killer you can’t see or feel. With so many day-to-day life priorities, heart health simply isn’t top of mind for most people. And, the need to spend time, money, and effort visiting a doctor to assess heart-disease risk can be a barrier to taking early action. Combined, it makes getting people to take an assessment of their heart-disease risk factors a daunting task.

Bayer® Aspirin’s objectives were:

1) Get people who are at risk to feel inspired, encouraged, and motivated to do something about it

• Measured via Ace Metrix Empower Score

2) Get them to take action to assess their risk with our digital heart-risk assessment tool

• Site visits

• Time on site

• Assessment completion

While brands spend millions sponsoring players and teams, we sponsored something more important… Fans. Our idea, “The Official Sponsor of Fans’ Hearts,” made vivid the potential risks of being a fan and drove fans to assess risk factors at CheckYourHeartRisks.com.

We launched during heart health month (February) with a film dramatizing the intensity of sports fandom that ran locally during the Super Bowl for fans of the teams playing, used custom media segments to bring the risk to life at key moments during other big games, and partnered with the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team to launch an OOH/print campaign turning the team’s logo into a potentially life-saving message.

Our strategy was to change the tone of the heart-health conversation among sports fans, and our idea created a wake-up call by linking heart-attack risk to the passions of fandom, positioning Bayer® Aspirin as a supporter, not a scold.