DTC Special Feature 2021: The room where it happened

The room where it happened

Area 23 chief creative officer Tim Hawkey explains the origins of three of the agency’s recent award-winning consumer campaigns.

By Joshua Slatko • [email protected] 

“Fighting for Words is a great story. We had created the now famous ‘One Word’ film for the Constant Therapy app, which followed the journey of a single word ‘baby’ fighting to get out of a brain with aphasia. Fighting for Words is the follow up to the film, and they are the first posters that can actually be used to treat aphasia. The posters show a single word on the tip of a giant tongue (like SHEEP), fighting to get out. And the word is surrounded by sound alike words (like ship or shed). This replicates the condition of lateral paraphasia, and the modality of the Constant Therapy app, which uses visual based speech training. The posters come with a work sheet that patients use to retrain their brain using key exercises. From a visual standpoint, we knew we needed to be in illustration here. It’s a giant tongue covered in anthropomorphized objects. If this were photorealistic it would cost a fortune, but also illustration is preferred because the medium evokes the imagination and the surreal and is very effective in suspending disbelief.”

“Storied Eyes came from a brief from our Horizon client. We had launched Tepezza, a therapy for rare thyroid eye disease (TED) during the pandemic, and we need to look at non-traditional ways to get the word out. Ironically, a national TV campaign was as non-traditional as it gets because this was a rare orphan disease. Our task was to use key symptoms of this eye disease as a trigger for patients to self-identify. But this was the pandemic and we had six weeks to get this spot on the air. Animation was going to be our only solution. It was a godsend, because we were able to tell these very visceral stories about eyes, the agony of bulging, the torture of dryness, etc.”

“Max and Maxine was a labor of love. It’s a project that came out of a Lilly brief for Cyramza, whose bedrock was that there are patients with metastatic cancers that really live for the small moments. So we developed a film idea about an older man with cancer who is so present in the moment while playing with his granddaughter, that he becomes a kid again for the duration of the film. The visual approach was to use stop motion animation to evoke a sense of wonder and nostalgia. Like remember those old, animated Christmas movies from the ’60s starring Burl Ives?

“Now to do stop motion animation takes time, and it’s hard to ask your client to wait so that we can produce it. But this client could see the value in committing to the craft, and they were willing to wait for a more beautiful product. And we made sacrifices as an agency too. We wanted it to be perfect, but the budget didn’t allow for a bunch of executives torturing each frame for months. So that’s where the agency needed to put their money where their mouth is, and commit that time for free, in order to get it right. In the end we have an incredible film, that took some mutual sacrifice to get there.”