This campaign is part of a pitch developed for Fossati lab at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University

Fossati Lab came to our class looking for help. They were beginning a clinical study into a possible correlation between Cardiovascular Health and Alzheimer’s Disease, and needed to recruit participants ages 60+. My team, consisting of myself as the copywriter and Luis Larios & Mia Carbone as the art directors, came together with a campaign that targeted seniors by focusing on the scientific benefit the study could offer.

There were two main insights we discovered when constructing a strategy to promote this study. The first one was that senior citizens hate talking or even thinking about Alzheimer’s since the nature of the disease is so terrifying. This was incredibly important to us when constructing a tone for the campaign. There was no way we could do it without talking about Alzheimer’s, so we instead decided to focus on memories with family. This allowed us to keep the tone positive and friendly by addressing cognitive decline in a way that’s subtle but still clear. The other insight was that the study offered very little material benefit to the participants. While there was free bloodwork and MRIs, the study did not offer any treatment or cure for Alzheimer’s. The benefit laid in the possibility of a quicker diagnosis in the future. Therefore, any messaging we created needed to rely on people’s generous nature and willingness to pay it forward.

All of this came together to form the campaign we called “The Future Is Worth Remembering”. The print execution you see on the right here was written by myself and designed by Mia Carbone. Our team kept coming back to this idea of a scrapbook brain made together of different family photos from throughout a person’s life, which was the consistent through line throughout the whole campaign. The tag “the future is worth remembering” stuck out at me as soon as I wrote it. I knew the sentiment was paradoxical and sure to grab a second look when someone walked by it at the grocery store, and it also played directly into our second insight of relying on people’s generous nature and paying it forward. The body copy was also broken into easy to digest pieces so that viewers would be able to understand quickly what the study was, what participation entailed, and how to register.

Beyond your basic print executions, we also developed a video execution that could be shown on local television or YouTube. The script was written by myself and the storyboard was drawn by Luis Larios. This execution allowed us to further develop our original idea of scrapbook photos coming together to form a brain. With the video script, I aimed to tell the entire story of a man’s life (including his participation in the study) using only photographs. You can take a look at the storyboard below or read the full script here. Below that, you can find a press release I wrote for the study that simplified the clinical language into easy-to-understand english for both possible participants and media outlets looking to run with it as a story.