Cannes, France – How do you change someone's mind? The brands at Lions Health took a wide range of strategies to overcoming the barriers of indifference, certainty, and fear to create educational moments that gave people the room to really explore. Here are four of our favorites:
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The Herosmiths
The team at Bayer set out to create a safety net of aspirin-carrying citizens who could offer help to someone having a heart attack. The idea: If every person with the most common last name in the U.S. carried aspirin, more lives could be saved. So, they started recruiting Smiths. Their HeroSmith kit transforms ordinary Smiths into potential heroes, complete with identification and aspirin-carrying bling. The program launched in Fort Smith, Arkansas, a city with one of the highest heart attack rates in the country. Every citizen Smith was armed with a kit and their stories and experience were collected in an online documentary. Since then, Smiths have taken it upon themselves to spread the word by sharing the video, tagging each other on Twitter and wearing their Hero name as a badge of honor.
Last Laugh
The Indian Association of Palliative Care was back at Cannes this year with another effort to overcome the taboo about talking about death and dying in Indian. That taboo keeps families and care teams from having important conversations about just how someone wants to die, forcing live saving procedures to extend life rather than palliative care to preserve its dignity and choice. This year, the association asked dying patients to take to the stage to joke about it. These patients were selected from hundreds of terminally ill patients that IAPC members support daily, and trained by India’s best stand-up comedians – Kunal Kamra, Kashyap, Vinay Sharma and Punit Pania. The live experience made its way to television, the internet and radio before going global with the BBC.
Down Syndrome Answers
When expectant parents learn their unborn child has Down syndrome, they have roughly 10 days to decide if they will proceed with the pregnancy. They often receive the diagnosis in shock and leave the doctor without asking their most pressing questions. When they go online, those questions can lead them to overly clinical or unreliable answers. Down Syndrome Answers was created to provide these parents with reliable answers to the most Googled questions about Down Syndrome, from the most informed source: people with Down Syndrome. The videos each feature one question and a personal, honest answer from a person living with Down Syndrome.
Sydlexia Folding Posters
People with dyslexia can struggle to read even the simplest word. Sydlexia is a division of Sydney Dyslexia focused on new learning methods and techniques. To get people talking about those new possibilities, they distributed a series of posters with broken and scattered letters and words. The call to action: go to their website to learn how to fold them. There, short videos show how to follow the clues in the scattered words to fold delightful origami animals, each labeled with its name. The folding posters highlighted just how difficult it can be to make meaning out of what looks and feels like visual chaos.
