A masterclass on mental resilience for a chronic illness, amplified by a social campaign

An Apple A Day developed a campaign that goes beyond calling people to action. Through a masterclass on mental resilience and a broad social campaign, patients living with a chronic illness get real tools to take charge themselves.

The challenge

The brief was clear: create a campaign that gives patients more control over their condition. How to do that was left open. Our analysis turned up two things. There is already a great deal of written content on subjects like this, so another informational campaign lands you in a crowded field where it is hard to stand out. And more importantly, plenty of campaigns urge patients to take action but leave out the how. People get an instruction, not a toolkit. That was the opening.

The approach

Our conclusion: taking charge does not start with more information, it starts with knowing how to live with your condition. So we turned it around. Instead of another informational campaign, we focused on the how: the psychology of living with a condition, dealing with uncertainty, building mental resilience, and standing up for yourself in a healthy way. We also made a deliberate choice for video. Where written content floods the market, video fits the way people take in information today. It is a growing trend, it performs strongly on social, and it makes a human, motivating story far more tangible than text.

To carry that message, we developed a masterclass with motivational speaker and mental resilience trainer Michael Kortekaas , alongside a patient with an active social media presence. The trainer brings the psychological side and the resilience, the patient brings the recognition and the reality of daily life. That made the message inspiring and relatable at once: expert knowledge paired with the experience of someone who knows exactly what it is like.

One theme kept coming back: the conversation itself. For many patients, talking about their condition is the hard part, whether with the people close to them, their clinician or at work. The campaign gave them tools for exactly those conversations: how to raise the subject, how to set a boundary, and how to make sure you get what you need. So patients learned not only how to live with their condition, but how to bring the people around them along.

We developed the full campaign concept, from the creative idea to a distinctive design line that ran consistently through every asset. From the videos to the materials for the consulting room and the content online, everything came out of a single idea, so the campaign feels like a whole. It was also created in partnership with a patient foundation, which brought recognition, trust and credibility with the target audience. Activation ran along two tracks: through the clinician as a trusted source in the consulting room, and directly online through a social campaign. A trusted source and broad reach reinforcing each other.

The result

A campaign that does more than motivate patients. It gives them concrete insight and the ability to act. By putting the psychology of living with a condition at the centre, people came away with practical tools to stand more firmly in life and to open up the conversation with those around them. With one recognisable concept running consistently through every material, from the consulting room to the social campaign, the theme found a place in patients' daily lives.

The numbers back that up. The episodes run around eight minutes and deal with heavy subject matter, so we expected drop-off. The opposite happened. More than half of viewers watched an episode all the way through, and that figure climbed from episode to episode rather than falling. Anyone who started the series watched almost all of it. The episode on vulnerability, on paper the most uncomfortable theme, was watched the longest.

The social campaign also performed well above the sector benchmark, both on reach and on cost per click. In a market where every sentence goes through an approval process, that is anything but a given. What it leaves behind is a way of working that holds up for legal and compliance as well as for performance, in a corner of the market where almost nothing existed for this audience.

And it is not finished. The campaign continues, with retargeting of the audience that already showed engagement, exploration of new channels, and the clinician's perspective being developed further.

"What you see is that when you connect everything properly: a good concept, good people, good production, good content, good online performance, strategy and execution. That really works."