2019 Winners & Shortlists

Background.

The situation: In Iraq every year thousands of doctors and health care staff are attacked and killed because the people blame them for not being able to save someone's lives. Despite the doctors working hard under impossible circumstances they are continuously blamed for situations that are out of their hands. It's time to change that! The brief: To come up with integrated campaign featuring Video + Still Imagery that would go viral and educate the people of Iraq on the hardship doctors face everyday and the effort they put in saving lives, also by killing a doctor or taking revenge on health care staff you are only putting more lives at risk. The objectives: To educate the Iraqi people on the difficult circumstances under which doctors and health care staff work to save lives everyday and the risk they put themselves through.

Describe the creative idea.

Health care staff are not here to die, they are here to save the lives of you and your loved ones! Inspired by that statement we developed the idea of immersing our target audience in a realistic experience that puts them right in the centre of the situation to make them understand what really happens inside that operating room, inside that ambulance, inside the hospitals and medical fields.

Describe the strategy.

During our research into the health care situation in Iraq we deep dived into the lives of patients and as well as doctors and support staff to really understand the core issue people were facing and the insight we found was that people automatically blame doctors for when things go wrong. It's a natural instinct for them. People do not see doctors as human beings with lives, they see them as robots who should just perform the job no matter the difficulty or hardship in place, for us it was important that we create a dramatic video that realistically portrays what doctors go through everyday and that they too are human beings, they suffer just like the rest of us. On top of the video campaign we also created a hashtag #????_????? that people could show their support through to increase the shareability of the campaign and it's potential reach.

Describe the execution.

Today hospitals in the country are not what we usually imagine them to be like! We created a very realistic setting that shows the state of the country's hospitals, the situation of our doctors and hardship our health care staff face on daily basis. We recreated scenarios that are all too common to the health care staff who live it on daily basis. It's very important for our audience to see the other side of the story and to see the situation from a different prospective than the one they already have.

List the results.

It was an astounding success with millions of combined view on social media, thousands of shares, likes and comments everyday pitched in on the conversation. Even TV channels started talking about it and airing the campaign free of charge. Furthermore the country's biggest telecom operators Asiacell and Zain supported the campaign by re-sharing the video on their social media pages as well as sending Mass SMS to their consumers informing them of the campaign.