No Sympathy: Gillette Children's Unflinching Campaign Against Pity

One of the most common reactions to someone else's bad news is not knowing what to say. The first instinct is to give comfort, to be positive, to offer advice. These reactions are grounded in basic human goodness; without thinking about whether or not we should, we take full responsibility for taking away someone's pain, someone we perceive as helpless. Using only two words, Gillette Children's brand campaign cuts through to overturn those unquestioned assumptions decisively: “Cure Pity.”



Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare is a world-renowned, non-profit hospital in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. The integrated campaign, which uses local broadcast, web, and out-of-home advertising to feature stories like Noah's, inspires a new way of thinking---going from great to greater; from achievement to lasting achievement---as an alternative to our habitual response, which is to go from what we think of as "bad" to slightly better. From disabled to merely able. As a message, Cure Pity is powerful enough to help people start looking at their fellow humans a little differently.

Advertising also has a practical agenda, especially for organizations that thrive on donations. The campaign is as smart and strategic as it is inspired.

A more "pity-focused" message doesn't always prompt an immediate response. You see pictures of children suffering from widespread, incurable diseases, or social conditions like poverty, and feel no hope that your one, meager contribution can make any difference. You won't cure leukemia; you can't stop AIDs; and to date, there's no immediate way to prevent or stop certain congenital conditions like cerebral palsy. Perhaps you make one donation, one time, to shake off the uncomfortable feeling of pity. Instead of pity, a more positive message invites compassion, which is an invitation to a deeper experience of shared humanity.

Cure Pity asserts a call to action based on admiration instead of despair. In for-profit marketing terms, the tagline competitively positions Gillette Children’s as an organization focused on overall improvement of quality of life. Other hospital systems seem more symptom- and condition-focused in comparison.

From a visual perspective, the campaign has one unrealized opportunity. It could do much more to back up the inspiring images, and inspired copywriting, with inspired design. Something to stimulate the eye as much as the spirit, and likewise, to promote immediate recognition. Copy works together with design; if either seems weaker than the other, it can appear as though an organization is not fully committed to delivering what it says.

(A long time ago Blue Cross Blue Shield's "Do" campaign introduced a design approach that was unusually sophisticated for an insurance company. It was hot. And it was immediately recognizable. It's getting tired now, probably because Crispin Porter + Bogusky has left the building. Many non- and semi-non-profit organizations end up here: taking over a creative services role that falls outside of their core strengths. Neither the organization nor its agency can afford to maintain the relationship.)

Rethinking the way design can frame the existing patient stories and messaging is one way to refresh Cure Pity’s media approach, which is actually a few years’ old now. The brand messaging is strong and there’s no need to reinvent it, but the organization could look again at how it is expressed.

The strength of Cure Pity is storytelling. As a creative achievement, it asserts a social message that also helps a mission-driven organization continue to do great work. Advertising becomes culturally relevant when it can do either one of those things; curing pity does both.


- Eric Hayward

How Emotions Shape Our World.

Are we engaging in honest, compassionate communication when we talk to people about their health, or just spewing data? More importantly, are we listening?

If you go far enough out into space, the Earth looks like little more than a pale blue dot. Astronomer Carl Sagan said the following about such a picture of Earth, taken by Voyager spacecraft, in an excerpt from a 1996 commencement address.

That's home. On it...every hunter and forager...every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every...mother and father, every inventor and explorer...every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. Think of the rivers of blood spilled [to] become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

The delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe [is] challenged by this point of pale light... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

From this perspective, it’s hard, at first, to think that anything we do matters. Fortunately we have emotions. Seemingly at war with the cold logic of space, the color of emotion paints our world as far bigger than a mere dot. Logic assembles our experience as data and facts. Emotions, however, spin facts into stories.

Telling ourselves these stories we define realities that challenge meaninglessness. These are the realities of family, lovers, and friends. Our emotions expand the significance of these circles to become worlds in themselves.

Health care: world of confusion

Are we pushing out data or addressing people's emotions when we talk to them about health?

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Landmark Research on Health Advertising Reveals the Pitfalls of Preaching

The problem of pushing individual accountability as a way to sell” good” health behaviors

People are great. In spite of our misguided moments, we’re generally trying to do best by ourselves, our families, and if we can swing it, by our neighbors and our communities.

If you share this basic belief, you might be troubled by the tone that creeps into a lot of consumer health messages. These messages suggest America’s trillion-dollar health care problem is our fault, because we eat Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, smoke, drink, sit on the couch, or forget to get our blood pressure checked.

The messaging I’m talking about often emphasizes individual accountability for “better health behaviors.” The object of the communication is a mysterious cabal of unhealthy Americans, kind of like Reagan’s Welfare Mothers, whom it demonizes.

Media studies suggest focusing on individual accountability is not only ineffective, but worse, avoids targeting social and economic factors that may be the underlying causes of health problems.

The study in question, Advertising Health: The Cause for Counter-Ads, is actually about a form of advertising recommended by many public health, communications, and media experts. Personally, I don’t love counter ads, which generally include some form of attack against an organization or institution. However true, any message posed as a negative risks not asserting a positive. I think positives reflect better on the speaker as a brand foundation for ongoing messaging.

But the real revelation of this study is not so much the specifics of the counter ad format. It’s the underlying approach, which is significant in the way that it avoids targeting the individual. Rather, it builds affinity with the audience, pitting viewers as unwitting players in a bigger but unbalanced story, one with inequities that that can now be righted.

So—rather than saying, “Hey, stop eating so many carbs, fatty,” we can say, “Foodmakers mix secret ingredients into everyday foods that taste just fine by themselves.” The ad could go on to reveal the shocking number of unnecessary calories contained in mega-carb additives. The tone could bear some enlightened outrage at the challenge to our independence posed by producers, who try to inform our sense of what tastes good.

This approach works better, the study suggests, because it raises the attention of communities and institutions whose programs, support or legislation can help attack the real problem. It led to things like the creation of food labels, for example.

I think this approach works better not because it leads to more legislation, but because, as the recipient of it, I don’t resent the message. It doesn’t judge me for my waistline or my habits. It doesn’t assume I have the time or income to spend two hours at the gym or buy organic foods. It has some compassion for my position but also makes me feel like I have power and choice.

Mostly, it doesn’t judge me for the ill effects of being a Consumer (think about the real meaning of that word), which is exactly what government and industry want me to be.

Here’s an ad I’d love to see. We hear a quirky, fast-paced, techno-carnival soundtrack.
We follow one and then more everyday people trying to get through their everyday lives despite a barrage of comforts and conveniences, all of which impede their natural progress. (If you’ve ever been corralled onto a moving walkway in the airport to traverse the distance of only a couple gates, you’ll get what I mean).

Corporate health care is part of the same consumer system that continually peddles convenience. With a change in awareness, health care leaders can help extract the industry from this giant, idling hamster wheel. Health care can become a powerful agent of reform for our whole way of life.