Pablo's campaign for the MND Association follows singer Jaki Jackson in a first-person film, with posters where everything blurs except the subject's face.
The MND Association has launched Life Stripped Away, a campaign by the agency Pablo that shows motor neurone disease taking away not just movement but the things people love. The hero film puts the viewer inside the life of Jaki Jackson, a performer and singer from Brighton, who now needs round-the-clock care from her partner, Steve.
The 90-second film is shot from Jaki’s point of view, cutting between her past on stage and her present at home. A radio version uses Jaki’s own voice, recreated through voice banking with the charity’s help, as she explains how the disease has taken her singing and her ability to swallow: “My name’s Jaki and I love singing, but I have Motor Neurone Disease.”
The posters, shot by the photographer Emma Hardy, profile three more people with MND in the places they love: Lorraine Redmond, a dancehall fan, Tahira Chaudhry, a gardening grandmother, and Steve Williams, a music producer and former session drummer. Pablo’s designers blurred and smeared everything around each subject except their face, because the eyes are often the last thing a person with MND can move, as Creative Review reported.
Ben Liam Jones directed the film through Merman, with Tom Hole as director of photography. Pablo’s executive creative directors Ray Shaughnessy and Dan Norris said the aim was “to be both tender and visceral in a truthful way”, and founding partner Ben Kay called the campaign “unapologetically hard hitting”.
Charity advertising about terminal illness usually reaches for one of two registers, hope or horror. This finds a third: loss of the specific, the dancehall, the drumsticks, the trowel, which is how anyone who has watched someone they love decline actually experiences it. The poster technique is the standout, a visual idea that explains the disease without a word of copy.
It is one of several strong UK charity campaigns this autumn that put real people at the centre, after Alzheimer’s Research UK’s The First One and People Like Us. For a charity with far less money than the big cancer and heart charities, being impossible to forget is the whole media plan.
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