Overview
Industries
- Healthcare ,
- State/ Semi State
Services
- Advertising ,
- Creative Direction ,
- Digital Strategy ,
- Social Content ,
- Video
A national awareness campaign helping people make advance planning feel more human, relevant and urgent.
Advance Planning asks people to consider a difficult possibility: that one day, through illness, injury or loss of capacity, someone else may need to speak for them.
While tools such as Enduring Power of Attorney and Advance Healthcare Directives give people more control over what happens in that moment, they are often seen as complex, legal and bound up with death or crisis.
The challenge was to create a campaign that made advance planning feel relevant before it becomes urgent, encouraging people to act while they still have the ability to make their own decisions.
Background
Most people understand the importance of planning ahead, but many delay taking action. Enduring Power of Attorney and Advance Healthcare Directives can feel like things to deal with later, or only when they become absolutely necessary.
For the Decision Support Service, the campaign needed to shift the conversation. Rather than leading with legal processes or worst-case scenarios, it needed to connect with people through something more immediate and relatable: the people who know us best.
The Idea
You Know Me
We all have someone who properly knows us.
They know the little things.
How we take our tea.
The way we load the dishwasher. (Wrong apparently)
What we would never wear. The shows we love but pretend not to.
But more than that, they understand our values, our principles and the decisions we would want made on our behalf.
The campaign was built around a simple emotional truth:
Creative Platform
Captured Closeness
The visual approach centred on real relationships, real warmth and the small expressions that say everything.
The campaign used a photobooth-inspired filming treatment to capture the ease, humour and connection between people who know each other properly.
Alongside this, portrait photography helped bring warmth and intimacy to the stills campaign, capturing the natural closeness between each pair.
Rather than staged perfection, each relationship brought its own dynamic, from sisters and childhood sweethearts to partners, parents and children.
This gave the campaign a visual system that felt immediate, intimate and human.
Execution
The campaign rolled out across:
TV and VOD
A 60-second hero film and three 30-second duo edits brought the relationships and campaign idea to life.
Press and print
A series of newspaper and magazine ads used intimate portraiture and direct messaging to encourage people to consider who they would trust to speak for them.
Social and digital
Carousel formats extended the campaign narrative across platforms, balancing emotional recognition with clear calls to action.
Radio
Three script variations supported the wider campaign, helping to bring the message into everyday conversations.
Credits
Creative, Strategy & Social: Idea (idea.ie)
Video Production: Courtyard (courtyard.media)
Photography: Patrick Bolger (patrickbolger.com)
