A successful campaign requires only one thing. And another thing. Oh, and that other thing.

The key to this campaign was the strategic platform. - Stephen Fitch, Account Manager

With 15,000 employees 47 locations and services from prenatal to geriatrics, Lifespan had grown into the region’s essential health network—providing care for Rhode Island’s 1,000,000+ residents.

But as services and properties were brought into the fold, each continued their independent campaigns. This required Lifespan to divvy up their marketing money into many smaller budgets. The result being that no one budget was able to reach a critical mass, and there was no cohesive, unifying message for the Lifespan brand.

Watching Lifespan’s marketing department strain under the load, we proposed a radical idea: stop advertising every thing. Instead let’s only advertise everything.

Instead of marketing each service line, let’s tell a bigger story about Lifespan as a single organization and its essential but under-appreciated role in keeping our community healthy.

This Master Brand approach would allow us to roll up marketing monies into a single budget. This would put us in a position to create premium content with the kind of media weight behind it required to build awareness and truly start shifting brand perception.

The key to this campaign was the creative insight. -Alec Beckett, Creative Partner

So those smug account people wanted to mash up all the service lines into one campaign. Fortunately we realized that while all those different service lines do a thousand different things—from stitches to brain surgery—really they all just do one thing: get their patients back to their lives.

So we asked ourselves, is there a way to celebrate life—not the big, obvious events—but the infinite small moments whose preciousness we never truly appreciate until our health puts them at risk?

If we could do that, we could start shifting the perception of Lifespan from just a provider of medical services, to the people who enable life to unfold in all its beautiful, boring, wonderful, weird glory.

The key to this campaign was the execution. -Lizzi Weinberg, Head of Production

Great, so all the creatives are asking of us is to document all of human existence.

So how to capture a huge volume of authentic life moments that are both mundane yet magical?

A traditional production approach would have blown up our budget. And we suspected it wouldn’t get us what we were looking for even if we had the money.

So we let the end goal redefine our production process.

We didn’t want this to feel scripted. We didn’t want all the conscious choices—casting, locations, lighting, props, etc.—that go into a production to bring the tiniest whiff of inauthenticity.

So instead of asking what we needed, we started stripping away what we didn’t: No scripts. No actors. No crew. No lights. No props. No wardrobe.

We ultimately decided we needed only two things: talent and time.

For talent we settled on Gnarly Bay—a small company whose personal passion projects are documentaries that give you all the feels.

And we gave them time. Using our collective social circles, we found participants willing to invite us into their lives. Gnarly Bay spent weeks as unobtrusive observers finding the beauty in the regular life stuff they were already doing

It was an unusual approach that required a solid circle of trust between the agency, our client, and the production company.

But when the first batch of footage came in, and we sat mesmerized watching sixteen minutes of random strangers doing almost nothing, we knew we had done something special.

So who really deserves the credit for this powerful campaign? You decide.

“This is what we get.” :60 sec

Paired :15 sec

Paired :15 sec

Paired :15 sec