Our brief was to create a major awareness and fundraising campaign for WEHI. WEHI is a world-renowned, leading Medical Research Institute in Australia. It is broad-based, with no speciality in any particular disease area.

WEHI faces fierce competition in attracting donations – and not just against other Research Institutes. With Australia in a cost-of-living crisis, people are donating less. And they tend to choose causes that have more immediate effect – alleviating poverty and hunger, disaster relief and the like.

These other causes address an urgent, highly emotional need. By contrast, the cures and treatments that WEHI is working on may not come for decades. In fact as with all medical research, there are no guarantees. WEHI’s previous campaign work focussed on researchers in laboratories.

Our challenge was to create a human connection – to present WEHI’s lifesaving work as vital, urgent and deeply personal. The DPR&Co team created the positioning line “You are the cure.” The campaign creative is deeply moving. Instead of featuring researchers and scientists, it shows a series of suffering patients, inviting the viewer to imagine a loved one suffering from a life-threatening disease.