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Tourettes Action
Issue 30 | March 2014
Agency
LIDA
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director Nicky Bullard Creative Group Heads Andrew Pogson Dan Wright
Other Credits
Managing Director Victoria Fox Account Director Gita Mackintosh
Date
September 2013
Background
Tourettes Syndrome (TS) affects over 300,000 people in the UK but awareness has been low. People affected by it can suffer from extreme symptoms, which
are often misunderstood as antisocial behaviour. In severe cases, this leads to complete social exclusion as they are effectively filtered out by an intolerant society.
The objective was to raise awareness of TS and challenge public attitudes towards the condition. The campaign attempted to overcome the social barriers that prevented sufferers from leading a normal life. As a charitable cause, TS was not well represented so another objective was to raise the profile of Tourettes Action, through this campaign.
Idea
The idea was a viral email that played on a big misconception about Tourettes, that the condition is just about involuntary outbursts of swearing. In fact, chronic swearing affects only 1 in 10 sufferers, but the stereotype gave a useful hook to engage people about the wider issues. To ensure the email went viral, offensive swear words were embedded into the copy, but in such a way that they would not be blocked by corporate mail servers and firewalls. The idea demonstrated how Tourettes could make a breakthrough in society. Barriers that block rude words were literally smashed through to ram the message home. The campaign had massive cut-through as the swear words were impossible to ignore, especially in a subject line.
Results
Within 24 hours of mailing just 200 influencers, open rate of over 1000% was achieved. In reality this figure was much higher as Tourettes Action was unable to track emails where images weren't downloaded.
Our Thoughts
This is a f**king clever idea. I was there at the Caples Awards just before Christmas and knew it would do well because it was one of the campaigns the judges were talking about after the judging, whilst partaking in a few well- earned beverages. It answers the brief in both an innovative and a hard-hitting way. Whilst others focus on viral films, a viral email is an ambitious challenge. But the creative team found an ingenious solution, even getting it sent out by the charity’s CEO.
The donation ask was ambitious given this was an awareness brief and probably slipped in by the client, but a bloody nice job. B**tards.