Aware Is Halfway There

Drug & alcohol awareness advertising can be stern and a bit heavy-handed, and therefore often alienating to the target audience.

So when our client, DEN, wanted to raise awareness of a common cause of household accidents - unintentional inebriation due to mixing alcohol with medication - we decided to go wildly-ridiculous, rather than super-serious.

Our concept was designed to bring people along for the ride, rather than scare them away before engaging with the message.

I teamed up with the very talented Chas, and together we came up with a series of ads to run during The Block. In Australia we love our home reno tv shows, especially The Block. It’s basically just a wonderfully addictive reality tv soap opera with a thin competitive-renovating veneer, and its audience were our target - basically adults at the DIY age / stage.

The set of ads are three different stories, with the main characters casually telling us about their massive injuries caused by mixing alcohol and new meds. The medium of animation lends itself well to non-serious, unrealistically extreme violence, so we really lent into this (as Captain Raymond Holt would say) ‘for humour purposes’.