Innovation Award

Flu season 2021/22 was different. Covid was still king and vaccinations messaging was rife. Flu was about to reappear, which can be worse for kids. We needed something impactful. So we physically sneezed on people.

Our immersive cinema advert featured a young girl talking to cinemagoers directly. When she sneezed, it broke the fourth wall, actually spraying the audience.

With both cinema advert and a poster filmed and amplified on social media, in just four weeks a quarter of Manchester’s population had interacted with our campaign, with 2,032,106 impressions (80% watching the film until the end). Plus a 12.7% uplift in local child flu vaccinations.

Judges Comments

A really cool concept, taking the two-dimensional and making it three. The immediacy of the engagement is clear from the results that followed.

Loved the use of cinema to roll out the message, especially with the plants in the audience. It would make us all think about how flu spreads. Well done.

Flu season 2021/22 was different. Covid was still king and vaccinations messaging was rife. Flu was about to reappear, which can be worse for kids. We needed something impactful. So we physically sneezed on people.

We “hacked” traditional digital poster sites with built-in speakers and bespoke spraying mechanism synced to the film of someone sneezing so the “sneeze” was projected over passers-by.

With both the poster and a cinema advert filmed and amplified on social media, in four weeks a quarter of Manchester’s population had interacted with our campaign, with 2,032,106 impressions (80% watching the film until the end). Plus a 12.7% uplift in local child flu vaccinations.

Merck wanted to re-engage HCPs with their two flagship oncology medicines that hit hard and intelligently target tumours. The proposition: Bring the fight against cancer to the 2022 ESMO Congress.

Inspired by rage rooms, the “Time to Target” experience armed HCPs with Merck-branded baseball bats and challenged them to destroy a larger-than-life tumour. Contact triggered an animation of the tumour exploding and revealed efficacy messages emerging from the debris. A speedometer inside the tumour converted HCPs’ rage against cancer into a high score, ranking them on a leaderboard. To finish, every participant was presented with their own bullet-time action replay.

“What Lies Beneath the Surface” is an augmented reality (AR) experience that challenges the perception that chronic kidney disease-associated pruritus (CKD-aP) is “just an itch” from a literal, different point of view — direct from the patient, in the discomfort of their own home.

Combining the essence of a “gallery expo” with AR, three realistic miniature patient figures come to life to tell their story and address the real impacts CKD-aP patients face; namely sleep deprivation, social isolation and depression. By combining the models with AR, we brought the models to life — providing a never-seen-before perspective of CKD-aP directly from the patients’ homes.