Finalist
Thinking Differently About Mental Health
Summary of work
We all have preconceived ideas of mental illness, but often overlook the impact it can have on everyday life such as social interaction, memory and attention. Collectively defined as cognitive impairment, a poorly understood term in the context of mental illness, our “Thinking Differently about Mental Health” campaign needed to make this connection between mental illness and cognitive impairment. Strategically this reflected the focus of Boehringer Ingelheim’s CNS research while building the newly established therapy team’s profile which had a limited social following.
Research insights highlighted that interactive puzzles would generate high engagement. Tapping into current mental well-being and brain training trends we positively interacted with people about a sensitive subject. Testing their skills with brainteasers tailored to the Boehringer Ingelheim social media channels we were able to highlight elements of ‘cognition’, such as attention, memory and perception.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram drove the multichannel campaign resulting in a high level of views, but importantly, secured unprecedented engagement around the posts and tweets, including interaction with notable influencers in mental health. We set people fun, trivial challenges to respond to on the spot which also delivered a more serious and important message about the need to rethink mental illness.
Judges’ comments
We liked a lot what this work was trying to achieve, its intent and how they were trying to do it. It was more innovative than traditional approaches and made a very strong use of social media tools. There were some great results for a relatively small budget and we particularly liked the use of social media optimisation. We also loved that it was a two-way dialogue and that it mixed short and long form content.
