Daniel Brown: Creative Director
BEHAVIOR CHANGE
PUBLIC HEALTH
GOVERNMENT
OUT-OF-HOME
DIGITAL/SOCIAL
The New York City Health Department was looking for a creative campaign that could reach active cocaine and heroin users to warn them of the risks of fentanyl, which is being secretly cut into drug supplies around the country. To connect with drug users, the message could not be critical of the audience for using, but instead resolute in keeping them alive and protecting them from unintended consequences that come from the fentanyl crisis.
As with any campaign with a broad reach, it is important to consider how the message will land with the general public and priority audiences. This campaign’s lack of judgment towards drug users could lead people to label it as pro-drug use and not tackling the root cause of the dangers that users are facing. To combat that perception, the campaign had to be unapologetic in its goal to help drug users survive so that they can find a path to a healthier lifestyle in the future. This is why we frame this initiative as a “survival” campaign.
When it comes to changing behavior, it is key to create a campaign that makes a quick connection, allows the target audience to self-identify, and establishes a message with a high recall rate. Campaign slogans that are direct and punchy command attention, coax people to look closer, and have an ease of translation that is optimal for multicultural audiences. For the fentanyl survival campaign, I created a slogan that sheds stigma around drug use, but doesn’t shy away from the urgency to pay attention: If you get high, don’t die.
We used iconography and concise language to aid in communicating the safety measures, repeating this visual language in every communication.
The fentanyl survival campaign centers on real stories of drug users who had near-death experiences with fentanyl but were able to survive because of one (or more) of the safety measures. In this way, we dignify drug users by celebrating their survival and allowing their traumatic stories to express the seriousness of the fentanyl crisis and engage other users. The collection of stories is deemed the “Didn’t Die” series, emphasizing how likely death is the outcome of accidental fentanyl use.
The Decision (La Decisión) comic strip series was ubiquitous on the New York City subways and buses for much of the 1990s. The soap-style comic used storytelling as a means to deliver a message about the risks of contracting HIV during the AIDS epidemic. The individual survival stories of our subjects take a page from the Decision series and are presented as short comic strips that teach lessons on safer drug use. Subjects like drug use and overdose can be difficult to depict in public communications, but using illustration opens the door to showing difficult moments in a way that people will be captivated by and genuinely learn from.