Finalist
Health & Wellness
Innovation Campaign
| Entrant: | adam&eveDDB New York, New York |
| Brand: | Gift of Life Marrow Registry / Doublemint |
| Title(s): | "Hero Gum", "OOH" |
| Corporate Name of Client: | Gift of Life Marrow Registry |
| Client Company: | Gift of Life Marrow Registry, Boca Raton |
| Client Company Founder and Chief Executive Officer: | Jay Feinberg |
| Client Managing Director: | James Rowe |
| Client Head of Brand Marketing: | Labcorp’s Communications & Marketing Team |
| Client Chief Strategy Officer: | Marti Freund |
| Client Company Operations Officer & General Councel: | Marti Freund |
| Client Company Director of Marketing: | Amy Glanzman |
| Client Company Donor Recruitment Director: | Chris Camacho |
| Client Company Vice President Marketing Gum & Mints: | Sissy Urista |
| Client Company Senior Brand Manager Gum & Mints: | Kelly Shipp |
| Client Company NA Brand & Content Director Gum & Mints: | Madiedo |
| Client Company Chief Medical and Scientific Officer Labcorp: | Brian Caveney |
| PR Company: | W Communications North America |
| PR Company Account Manager: | Gillian Shenkman |
| Agency: | adam&eveDDB New York, New York |
| Agency Chief Executive Officer: | Caroline Winterton |
| Agency Chief Creative Officer: | Brynna Aylward |
| Agency Executive Creative Directors: | Jason Ashlock/Paulo Junger |
| Agency Creative Directors: | Mussashi Shintaku/Vinicius Fernandes |
| Agency Copywriters: | Samuel Hamerski/Maddie Otero |
| Agency Art Directors: | Jay Checo/Melissa Rosner/Tahmari Tupponce |
| Agency Head of Design: | Mitch Horton |
| Agency Associate Design Director: | Melanie Coyne |
| Agency Head of Creative Operations: | Kimmy Harvey |
| Agency Head of Creative Talent & Culture: | Rene Ramirez |
| Agency Deputy Head of Project Management: | Ana Esterov |
| Agency Senior Project Manager: | Miranda Manziano-Reynolds |
| Agency Interns: | Anika Shandalov/Sofia Lee/Maya Yin/Benaelle Benoit/Danielle Cerutti/Jack Levi |
| Agency Managing Director: | James Rowe |
| Agency Executive Director: | Alan Perlman |
| Agency Account Supervisor: | Kevin Tejada |
| Agency Head of Strategy: | Stu Harrison |
| Agency Group Director, Communications Strategy: | Angel Navedo |
| Agency Senior Strategist: | Tiffany Jyang |
| Production Company: | Omnicom Production |
| Production Company Head of Production: | John Doris |
| Production Company Executive Producer: | Teri Altman |
| Production Company Producer: | Kayla Rudess |
| Production Company Group Business Affairs Lead: | Kelly McCann |
| PR Companies Account Director: | Evie Gavriel/Meagan Hoellerman |
| Animation Company: | Unsaid Studio |
| Animation Company Director: | Doug Bello |
| Animation Company Executive Producer: | Keka Petrich |
| Animation Companies Producer(s): | Franco Cavezale/Ana Bettoni |
| Animation Company 3D Animation: | Fabricio Luiz |
| Animation Companies 3D Modeling: | Luciano Nader/Alix Portier |
| Animation Company Motion Deign: | Renan Stein |
| Animation Company Creative Direction: | Tom Alex Buch |
| Animation Companies Render: | Pablo Porto/Caique Silva |
| Animation Company Rigger: | Rodrigo Rodrigues |
| Color Company: | Omnicom Studios |
| Color Company Colorist: | Aaron Flickinger |
| Recording Studio: | Omnicom Studios |
| Recording Studio Producer: | Mary Wright |
| Recording Studio Editor: | Henry DeMaio |
| Sound Design Company: | Omnicom Studios |
| Sound Design Companies Sound Engineer(s): | Kyle Dirr/Dominic Zunino |
| Sound Design Company Executive Post Producer: | Tricia Higgins |
| Sound Design Company Junior Post Producer/Content Creator: | Justin Oletsky |
| Sound Design Company Post Producer: | Cassandra Peterson |
| Music Production Company: | Human Worldwide |
| Music Production Producer: | Nicole Riolo |
| Music Production Composer: | Daryl Pinsdorf |
| Music Production Company Managing Director/Global EP: | James Dean Wells |
| Music Production Companies Written by: | Simon James/Von Hemingway/William Riddims Courtesy of APM Music |
| Recording Studio Live Action Director: | Larkland Burton |
| Design Company: | Bluedge |
| Design Company Design Director: | Greg Grasso |
Cultural Context:
This year, 20,000 Americans will need a stem cell transplant in order to survive.
So Gift of Life is on a mission: Find a bone marrow match for every patient fighting blood cancer.
But only 30% of patients will find a match within their families. The remaining 70% will need to rely on strangers through donor registries. Which is why Gift of Life is working hard to diversify its donor base.
Unfortunately, the most eligible donors – young people – don’t join registries, because the process of getting onto one involves cheek swabs and needles, which feels clinical and invasive.
If we wanted to build a donor base that reflects the diversity of the U.S. population today, we needed to come up with an entirely new way to bring people into the registry, one that doesn’t rely on using off-putting medical methods to collect DNA from donors.
We found the perfect way to transform their operations and the donor experience… in gum.
Not only have people been chewing gum since the dawn of time, but genomic research suggested that chewed gum holds onto your DNA cells for ages, too.
To validate whether chewing gum could actually work as a DNA collection method for our registry, we teamed up with the one of the largest and most trusted lab testing companies in the world: Labcorp. After months of research & development, we discovered that Mars gum brand Doublemint was the most effective chewing gum for HLA tissue typing, and that by chewing a piece of gum for just five minutes, we could produce a viable sample for matching donors and patients.
Re-imagining our donor registration process with gum as the collection method, we partnered with Mars to make Doublemint the official gum of the Hero Gum initiative. We created all-new packaging, bringing Gift of Life’s bright orange colors and Hero Gum branding to the forefront.
And then we launched our new Hero Gum kit in a place where gum fits right in: a baseball game, where chewing gum is part of the sport’s culture. We set up a booth at a New York Mets game at Citi Field and aired a video on the jumbotron telling people what Hero Gum was all about, driving them to participate in our first ever Hero Gum drive. Immediately following the game, we made Hero Gum kits available online for free, even rolling them out to select Gift of Life donor drives across the country.
People started buzzing over Hero Gum on social media, driving a +188% increase in engagements on Gift of Life’s social handles versus the prior month. Across Labcorp’s accounts, we generated 78.9k impressions and 20.5k video views. We even attracted attention from Jordan Rudess of the Grammy-winning band Dream Theater, who made his own video in support of Hero Gum, resulting in 37.6k views and 1.3k interactions.
We saw strong, wide-reaching coverage across consumer, pharma, and creative trade outlets, with a total influencer reach of 7.2M and a total reach of 269M, highlighting the strength of Hero Gum and public interest in our cause.
And not only was our Hero Gum innovation picked up in mainstream media, but it circulated through the medical community as well.
CVS reached out to host a Hero Gum drive at their headquarters, expressing interest in expanding into CVS stores throughout the country.
Swiss Blood Stem Cells (SBSC), a competitor to Gift of Life, contacted us to learn how to implement chewing gum as a DNA collection method for their own registry.
And the World Marrow Donor Association invited Gift of Life to present the Hero Gum initiative to attendees at their global conference in Madrid.
By turning something as familiar as chewing gum into a potential life-saving act, we removed some of the biggest barriers to registration, making younger and more diverse audiences more open to joining our registry.
With Hero Gum, Gift of Life is making it easy (and even fun) to join the fight to cure blood cancer, one stick of gum at a time.