Campaign Confidential: The Wait for NHS Blood & Transplant

Campaign: The Wait (2015)

Client: NHS Blood & Transplant

Agency: MHP-Engine

Some campaigns don't always get the recognition you feel they deserve, especially after the emotion invested into them. Overshadowed by its predecessor for blood donation, The Wait is definitely the most ambitious piece of work I've ever had signed off. Asked to produce a 60 second film, I pushed to make a 14 hour one - on the same modest PR budget. We stretched technical specs, budgets, over-servicing and working relationships to the limit only for it to be almost completely ruined by ISIS. Yet it was made possible by the bravery and co-operation of the Howell family and helped to provide a truly incredible outcome.

This was the second brief campaign brief we'd received from NHSBT and expectations were high. Having developed and launched Missing Type for blood donation earlier in the year - which became a national movement and broke all donation records - there was a sense of 'tricky second album' to create a high-impact campaign for organ donation.

This time it was less clear cut. To give blood one could simply be motivated to make an appointment at your nearest donor centre and help to save lives. In an age of immediate gratification you can walk out feeling good about your altruistic deed. To donate an organ - in most cases - you have to die first. Even if you did register it may take 50 years and something awfully finite happening before you have a chance of a payoff. For that obvious reason the target audience was significantly older (65+).

The message was that 6,800 people in the UK waiting for a donor and that many of those will have have to wait years. Yet one-in-ten will die before a matching donor is found for them. The challenge that had to be solved is how to give those numbers meaning.

Statistics have diminishing value and impact. They are just numbers which do not convey a human, personal story. (As Joseph Stalin said, 'One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic'). With a constant cycle of negative, distressing news we've become numb to the numbers of dead, dying and suffering and feel powerless to make a difference. The filmmaker Adam Curtis labelled this phenomena 'Oh dearism' - all we can do is think 'Oh dear' to each awful event presented to us.

To tell the story of the big numbers take a step back and focus on just one.

Empathy is required to unlock the story you want to tell. Imagine what it must be like to be waiting for news of an organ donation. Many will be housebound, unable to work or travel. Their home becomes a prison, days and weeks blur into one another, trying to remain stoic and optimistic as time runs down, waiting for the life-saving phone call that never comes.

The brief was to make a 60 second piece of content - on a modest PR budget - that would make national news. How do you capture that human story, the hope, the anxiety, the tragedy, the impact upon family in under a minute, without looking like another public health ad?

I didn't believe we could. There's a constant flow of public health and charity pieces of short-form content, we'd just be adding to the pile with no point of difference or anything newsworthy.

So rather than make a one minute piece of content, I pushed to make a 14 hour one: The Wait a film about life and death, hope and despair where nothing actually happens - to tell the story of the waking hours in a single day in the life of an organ patient.

What I wanted to capture was the tedium of life lived on a loop, where every day was the same: the sofa, the interminable cups of tea, the banality of daytime TV and watching the world go by your window - all the while living on borrowed time waiting for a phone call that could save your life.

Inspiration came from a few very different sources: Andy Warhol, an American fast-food chain and Big Brother. Warhol's 8 hour film Empire was a single static shot of the Empire State Building (don't bother checking it out). What if we could capture the monotony of a patient waiting at home and track their typical day using fixed cameras like Big Brother? Finally, a quick Google search revealed the world's longest ad was for the Arby's fast food chain in America (a single shot of brisket slow cooking for 14 hours). If our film was a few minutes longer The Wait could be 'the world's longest ad' (that would be the media pitch).

Now, my creative background is in PR. Photography I was well versed in, but until then the only cinematography I'd overseen was b-roll of events and stunts for broadcast news. I'd never made a 60 second ad, let alone a 14 hour one so I pitched the idea to Richard Glendenning and Dan Gorlov a creative pair from Engine's ad agency WCRS. They'd sent me the sizzle reels of some shit hot directors we could work with. They were all really impressive,

'How much will this cost?', I asked

'You need a decent director......that's a £100k...crew...equipment...editing...between £200 - £300k minimum.'

'I've got bad news, chaps...we've got £35k maximum'

Where there is a will etc. I went to Sassy Films, a company we worked with on PR film production and they were up for it. Because of the nature of the project they'd cut fee to make it happen. Dan and Rich would work on the creative, Sassy the production, we'd cross that bridge later and I pitched it to the client.

It was a completely contrary response to the brief, but I had some currency from Missing Type. The other part of the sell was we'd have so much footage we could make LOTS of 60 seconds clips for social. NHSBT gave it the green light with a fixed date to launch the campaign.

The only thing we needed was a donor and their family who be prepared to have their privacy invaded, a house overrun by creatives and crew and every minute of their day captured on film.

There followed an agonising wait to make The Wait. Nothing could happen until NHSBT, through its outreach to donor patients could find a willing family. Four agonising weeks passed. The timeline for production kept shrinking and the overambitious project looked like it was going to have to be abandoned - without a plan B for an NHS national organ donor campaign. Then, as we had already started developing panicked, alternative campaign ideas, and with just days to spare before the very last available day to film, the Howell family came forward.

Simon Howell, a former doctor, had been waiting seven years for a liver donor, and lived with his wife Anita and two young children. His illness had become so debilitating he was now housebound and f he didn't find a donor soon, he would die. The human reality and the of the project and the sensitivities about what we were doing suddenly hit home. Nevertheless, we had 16 days to meet the family, plan, prep, rig the house with 24 cameras and microphones, film, edit and release the film to media.

My job was to step a step back from the filmmaking, make sure it got made and mediate. To say there were creative tensions would be an understatement. The WCRS lads were perfectionists and didn't want to cut any corners; Sassy had already offered to cut fees and costs to get it made.

Ultimately, the film was not the story. It was simply a vessel to tell a human story. Simon - representative of thousands of unseen others like him - was the story. The 14 hours length a conceit, a headline for selling it to the media. We never intended for anyone to watch all 14 hours - or even an hour. This work needed to be on ITV and the Daily Mail, not Creative Review. A news editor wouldn't judge The Wait on artistic merit and the level of grading - they don't give a shit - but for the family story.

Against all the odds, it was made with the remarkable efforts of Dan and Rich, Sassy, the NHSBT and MHP teams and, most significantly, Simon and Anita. It's a beautiful, sensitive and poignant piece of work. The full film could be viewed on the NHSBT site. If anyone stopped or paused the film, the viewer would be reminded that if they'd had enough or waiting for something to happen Simon had lived 2,558 days like this - a a key line for media.

And, after all the stress and meltdowns, it was an easy-sell to media. A cinema in Piccadilly Circus offered us a screen, BBFC waived the normal four week wait wait to classify an ad as fit for screening and every national news programme was booked to cover the story and interview the Howells as their lead item. Three months from receiving the original brief we could finally relax for the first time. Never relax.

Two days before launch the Paris terror attack at The Bataclan happened. Schedules were wiped clean as every single news crew was dispatched to Paris to cover the aftermath. In a matter of hours The Wait was pulled from almost every single schedule. The client works into the Department of Health and putting it back was not an option. That week was assigned to organ donation, every other week assigned to something else. The calendar is fixed. The entire project looked like it was simply going to slip through the cracks and go unseen. Events, dear boy, events.

ITN stayed true to their word. The Wait was the lead feature item after Paris on the lunchtime news and News at Ten. ITV and BBC London also came down and Simon was the subject of features in The Daily Mail and Daily Mirror.

There was the crushing disappointment, the knowledge this could've been so much bigger had it not been for events in Paris. However, the time invested in it was worth the effort. We did what we set out to do - without knowing how we'd do it - and the campaign achieved a boost in new donor registrations. More significantly, Anita got in touch in 2018 to say that Simon, miraculously still fighting his illness, had finally found a donor and they continue to campaign for NHSBT.

The Wait was kind of forgotten after that. It was hardly even entered for any awards as Missing Type - in the same category, for the same client - had turned into a juggernaut, going on to win over 60, including Gold in Health at Cannes and PR Week and PRCA Campaign of Year awards. The Wait did win a few awards in Branded Content, but was always going to be obscured by its predecessor. It hasn't been forgotten by those who worked on it.

As for Dan and Rich, they got to make their masterpiece just over a year later with outstanding Own The Dancefloor for Bupa, which won at Cannes and was made with considerably more than 16 days and £35k.