About a million people in Ukraine live with a cancer diagnosis. Around 140,000 new diagnoses are made every year. Hearing it for the first time is a genuine shock.
October 2020. The country is in Covid, the feeds are full of panic headlines. And in the middle of that Nutricia decides to speak to the people who have it hardest: cancer patients and those close to them. Not to sell — to be there.
That is how the social and educational project “Buty Poruch” was born: verified information about nutrition during treatment, answers from experts, a community where you don't have to pretend everything is fine.
We joined forces with oncologists and psycho-oncologists, and with well-known cancer survivors — people who had been through it themselves and had the right to speak.
We built the project in social media — carefully, without grandstanding and without a single false note. In this subject falseness is audible immediately: an audience that deals with fear every day recognises an advertising tone from the first line.
So there was no “audience engagement”, no creative for creative's sake. There was verified information, plain language and patience. People wrote things in the comments after which the team would leave the artwork in silence.
More than 8 million people learned about the project. The medical nutrition category grew by 66%. Sales tripled.
And bronze at the Effie Awards Ukraine 2021 in the Positive Change – Social Good: Brands category. Effie is an award for effectiveness, not beauty: the jury looks at numbers, not at layouts. So the numbers confirmed what we felt in our gut.
Agency: elvisPelvis Company. Client: Nutricia. Partners: Newsfront PR Agency, Gvardiya Production House, CF.Digital.
