Heroes

As COVID-19 began, we needed to give Americans an emotionally and morally resonant motivation to respect stay-at-home protocols. Our concept was to starkly portray the raw, human vulnerability of LifeBridge Health’s 12,000 employees as they bravely cared for Greater Baltimore—helping viewers understand staying home as a vital way for them to protect these heroic, yet vulnerable, front-line workers. As a natural extension of the “Care Bravely” brand idea, we knew LifeBridge Health would be credible messengers for this vitally important public service message.

The challenge of execution during a public health crisis was enormous. We knew we had to avoid the generic, stock-footage filled messages many well-intentioned companies offered as their public responses. So we designed a different approach. Inside LifeBridge Health’s Northwest hospital at the height of the COVID pandemic, we created a socially distanced “Care Booth”. We invited front-line workers to be filmed in the first spontaneous moments after leaving their shifts, removing their PPE gear and emotionally processing the mixture of harrowing tragedy and inextinguishable hope. We followed all LifeBridge Health hospital social distancing protocols by allowing just one photographer, Emmy Award-winner Joshua Cogan, on location, while the rest of the StrawberryFrog creative team, and our production partners, Union Editorial, directed via a live video feed in real-time.

This innovative, deeply personal film moved Baltimore (“The three men in my house stopped. in. their. tracks.,” wrote one local nurse) and garnered global attention from Campaign.com, AdWeek, Ads of Brands and Merca2.0 among others for its raw emotional impact and creative method for documenting the human impact of working on the medical front lines.