While binging on Netflix during the pandemic, one of our favorite discoveries last year was an impossibly wholesome reality series from the BBC called The Repair Shop. Each episode follows professional craftspeople from across England who restore family heirlooms that have sentimental value for their owners.
Of course, The Repair Shop isn’t a real place you can take your trinkets. The show is staged. But we can assume the heirlooms and the work to restore them are real enough.
While watching the show, we couldn’t help but wonder if its creators had worked in an agency like ours. The way the team of experts on the show collaborates to bring these treasures back to life parallels the ways in which an agency works to bring a creative concept from idea to reality. As evidence: our recent award-winning campaign for Hancock Health’s Sue Ann Wortman Cancer Center.
The Big Idea
To start, we needed to come up with the campaign concept: the framework into which all of the campaign’s individual pieces would fit. We were especially drawn to the idea that most people who’ve been diagnosed with cancer have full, active lives to live beyond their diagnoses.
Our expression of this idea was that, as a regional leader in cancer care, Hancock Health is working every day to make cancer a smaller part of patients’ lives. This campaign theme fit perfectly within Hancock Health’s larger platform of making health possible for the people of East Central Indiana. And it would allow us to show how the care Hancock provides helps patients continue to enjoy the things that make them feel like themselves–even in the midst of the biggest fight of their lives.
Videos
We knew we’d need great patient stories to bring this campaign to life—but we didn’t want to default to standard patient testimonials. Fortunately, Hancock provided us a handful of wonderful patients to interview. We worked with our friends at Creative Video & Multimedia and spent a couple of days asking patients about their passions, their hobbies, all of the things that make them tick. We also interviewed some of the caregivers at the Sue Ann Wortman Cancer Center to get their perspective on the care they provide.
Illustrations
To complement the amazing patient stories and further separate them from typical patient testimonials, our design team got to work. We combined bright background colors with hand-lettered type and illustrations to accentuate the passions of each patient and make the work stand out visually across media: print, digital ads, social media, video, and more.
Digital Strategy
One of the centerpieces of this campaign was a simple, smart landing page where people facing a cancer diagnosis could go to learn about all the ways Hancock Health brings cancer down to size. We knew our designers would create an appealing page in line with the client’s brand. But it had to be functional, intuitive, and easy to find.
That’s where our developers and digital strategists shine. They planned the campaign and created the landing page, putting the creative team’s ideas into action and making the work live in the world.
See? Just as The Repair Shop may require the expertise of a carpenter, a watchmaker, and a silversmith to bring a single, old piece of furniture back to life, a great integrated marketing campaign requires a bunch of different talented people working in tandem. We’re also lucky to have the most valuable part of the team: a great client for whom we’re always excited to work with.
And sometimes, your peers recognize your good work, too: Our campaign just won a gold Aster award.