2024 Gold Out of Home

Agency: Medialab and New Commercial Arts

Client: Alzheimer’s Society

Entry Title: A week in Blackpool

Executive Summary

Dementia is the UK’s biggest killer. It is uniquely complex, cruel, and overwhelming. There is no cure but many people are undiagnosed. The campaign to raise awareness needed to be unavoidable.

Strategy

Undiagnosed dementia was the challenge to address. Dementia affects nearly one million people in the UK. However, fear and misunderstanding of the symptoms often prevent early diagnosis. With a limited budget, the team needed to create an impactful campaign that addressed these barriers and reached people at risk.

The vision was to completely transform a town for one week, turning every available OOH site into a poignant example of the reality of dementia. Doing so would enable the charity to integrate creative messaging and media placement - creating an unavoidable impression of dementia and offering location specific examples of dementia symptoms.

Creativity

Blackpool was chosen due to its high dementia prevalence and the concentration of the target audience, people aged 45 and over. The goal was to make dementia an inescapable topic by integrating creative messages into the fabric of the town, transforming familiar locations into a striking portrayal of dementia symptoms.

By localising the campaign, it could resonate with the community, making the experience both personal and urgent. It used 120 OOH sites to display 75 unique, location-specific messages. Each creative execution was unique based on the specific location it ran in to reflect the experience of living with dementia disorientation in familiar places, memory loss, and confusion were mirrored in the town’s streets, landmarks, and public spaces.

The hyper-local approach ensured that the campaign was not only seen but felt by everyone in the town, making dementia an unavoidable part of daily life during Dementia Action Week.

Results

FOR JUDGES’ EYES ONLY

The Team

Medialab - Koren Bower, Senior Account Manager - Maddy Buchanan, Account Director - Olivia Jacobs, Senior Account Executive - George Gwilliam, Business Director

Alzheimer's Society- Katherine Dennett, Senior Marketing Manager - Jamie Wellock, Senior Marketing Manager -Tom Brown, Associate Director of Strategic Marketing - Nick Wright, Head of Brand and Marketing

New Commercial Arts - Miriam Goode, Business Director - John Blight, Strategist - Toby Moynan, Account Manager - Zahra Banday, Account Manager