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Lions Health aims to get people in a
conversation about the one thing they love
to avoid–health.
S
ince its conception in 2014,
Lions Health has grown
bigger than ever this year.
The competition received
a total of 2,607 entries, a spike from
1,862 last year, a testament to the
increasing value of using creativity to
tackle and address healthcare issues.
The main goal of Lions Health,
according to Pharma jury president
Alexandra von Plato, and as we
can well see in the recurring theme
of the winning campaigns, is to
get people to talk about sensitive
topics like illnesses ranging
from cancer to diabetes and
respiratory diseases. These works
also try to convince people that
taking care of their health is not
something that should be put off or
avoided. It should be the norm.
“Creativity is all about breaking
into somebody’s consciousness. The
thing about health is people generally
don’t want to think about it. That
actually is what makes it hard,”
explains von Plato. “People are
shopping for a car, they’re shopping
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adobo magazine | July - August 2016
for sneakers, they’re thinking about
other things in the market but they’re
actually lots of times actively not
trying to think about health.”
Apart from the Grand Prix
winner, ‘Breathless Choir’ by Ogilvy
& Mather UK for Philips, some of
the Pharma judges shared in one of
the sessions of #insidethejuryroom
that one of their personal favorites
was JJ-Man, a campaign by McCann
Health Hong Kong for Priligy, that
used humor to talk about premature
ejaculation and why men should
consult their doctors about it.
A lot of campaigns entered
in the Health & Wellness
category also used humor to
tackle serious diseases like
breast and testicular cancer.
“We saw a lot of campaigns that
clearly used humor as a way into
some difficult healthcare ideas and
conversation that nobody wants
to think about or talk about,”
share Joshua Prince, Health &
Wellness jury president. “Two
cases that we saw both the ’Man
boobs’ and the ‘Testi-monials’
out of South Africa used humor
in a really effective way.”
This is not to say that humor
is the only effective way as
evident in the two Grand Prix
winners ‘Breathless Choir’ and
‘The Alphabet of Illiteracy’ by
FCB Inferno for Project Literacy.
Lions Health also saw trends in
campaigns that talk about cancer.
Though the jury recognizes the
attention that needs to be given to
this widespread terminal disease,
Prince thinks that the world needs
more work that tackle healthc are
issues that no one would think of
talking about. “Cancer clearly is
one of the major health issues in
the world today. There’s plenty
of other areas though. I was
surprised at how few entries we
saw around diabetes, a major
massive global epidemic in
developed countries. We really
didn’t see attention paid to that.
We need to see more work on that
particular healthcare space.”