Tag: Public awareness

The Day Shazam Forgot

Alzheimer’s Research UK partners with Shazam and does something deliberately uncomfortable. It gives the app the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. You use Shazam as you normally would, but the experience starts to break in ways that mirror memory loss. It is a hard-hitting way to feel, in a small moment, what daily struggle can look like.

The insight behind the campaign is about who needs to be reached. Most people associate Alzheimer’s with late life, but the disease can affect people as young as 40. The post cites over 40,000 people under 65 living with dementia in the UK.

The point is education through friction

This does not try to persuade with claims or statistics alone. It turns education into a lived interaction. Shazam is familiar and fast. Making it unreliable becomes the message.

Why the Shazam choice is strategic

Shazam already sits in a high-frequency behaviour loop. People open it in real life moments. That makes it a powerful carrier for a message about everyday disruption, because it arrives inside everyday life rather than as a separate awareness film.

What to take from this if you build digital experiences

  • If you want people to understand an abstract condition, simulate a small part of the experience, not just the outcome.
  • Put the message inside a familiar behaviour, so the contrast is instantly felt.
  • Use disruption sparingly and intentionally, so the discomfort has a purpose and does not turn into irritation.

A few fast answers before you act

What is “The Day Shazam Forgot”?

A Shazam partnership campaign that simulates Alzheimer’s symptoms to give users a direct, hard-hitting insight into memory loss.

Who is the campaign trying to educate?

A younger audience that may assume Alzheimer’s only affects people in late life.

What key fact reframes the audience assumption?

The disease can affect people as young as 40. The post cites over 40,000 people under 65 living with dementia in the UK.

What is the core creative technique?

Turning a familiar app experience into a controlled failure state, so the message is felt rather than only read.

Donate Your Profile

ActionAid is an organisation committed to many projects, like fighting hunger and poverty. But in Italy it is known primarily for the sponsoring of children.

So to communicate the work of ActionAid with a small media and production budget in Italy, ad agency DLV BBDO came up with the “Donate your Profile” project. Participants donated their Facebook and Twitter profile pictures to the project so that more awareness could be generated for the stories of people ActionAid helped.

The project received support from Radio 105, Radio Deejay, La Stampa, Marc Marquez and many other Italian celebrities and brands. Seeing this many more people joined in and donated their profiles pictures. The project became the 5th most trending topic on Twitter and received over 79 million media impressions.

To donate your profile visit https://case.donailtuoprofilo.it

AXA: Crazy Driver

A market-day shock that makes the point instantly

In European insurance marketing, the fastest way to explain risk is to make people feel the cost of it. AXA’s stunt is a clean example of that principle.

To raise people’s awareness and make them realize that nobody wants to pay for bad drivers, AXA decided to play a trick on people with the help of a little old lady.

On an ordinary market day in a small, tranquil French town, an old lady was seen getting out of her parking space. In the process she knocked almost everything in her way before crashing into a line of market stalls. With the reveal being.

How the “bad driver” setup delivers the message

The mechanism is staged reality in a real environment.

AXA uses a familiar public setting and a believable trigger. A driver leaving a parking space. Then it escalates into visible damage that bystanders can immediately judge as “this is what we do not want on the road.” The trick creates attention first, then makes space for the reveal and the point.

Why it lands in the moment

It works because it activates two instincts at once. Concern and fairness.

Concern, because nobody wants to see people hurt or property damaged. Fairness, because once people witness reckless behavior, the idea of everyone else paying for it feels wrong. That emotional sequence makes the message stick without needing a long explanation.

The business intent behind the stunt

The intent is to turn an abstract insurance argument into a shared social judgment.

Bad driving creates costs. The campaign pushes viewers and bystanders toward the same conclusion. Pricing and consequences should reflect behavior. By making that conclusion feel obvious, AXA strengthens its positioning around responsibility and risk.

What to steal for your next awareness activation

  • Start with a situation everyone understands. A simple parking maneuver needs no context.
  • Make the consequence visible. People react to outcomes they can see, not statistics they cannot.
  • Use escalation to earn attention. Build from normal to shocking so the message arrives when focus is highest.
  • Let the audience reach the conclusion. The most persuasive line is the one people say to themselves first.

A few fast answers before you act

What was AXA’s “Crazy Driver” trying to change?

It aimed to reduce risky driving by confronting drivers with an exaggerated version of their own behavior, making “normal” dangerous habits feel unacceptable.

What was the core mechanic?

Use a staged, high-salience demonstration that mirrors everyday driver shortcuts, so people recognize themselves and reassess their choices in the moment.

Why does this kind of activation work better than warnings?

It replaces abstract risk with a concrete social cue. People adjust faster when they feel observed and when the “line” of acceptable behavior is made visible.

What can brands steal from this approach?

Make the behavior the content. Build a simple, repeatable moment that triggers self-recognition, then let the social context do the persuasion.