Our Hero

Pfizer wanted to create a film that would educate various audiences about pneumonia, one of the biggest killers of over 50s in Europe. The film needed to provoke an emotional response from our target audience (20 - 45 year olds), so they feel a sense of responsibility to investigate vaccination. The film would need to be highly engaging, sharable and optimised for discoverability.
Our response centred around making the viewer feel a strong emotional engagement with the characters in the film, playing out the relationship between a grandparent and their grandchild. We wanted to challenge the sense that many older people feel they are a drain on society and their families. The viewer is then driven towards statistics explaining the prevalence of pneumonia prompting our audience to seek more information.
The most challenging problem with a project like this was one of casting and of finding emotional stories. In the lead up to Christmas 2017 and with a limited timeframe of only four weeks, we organised a prolonged period of casting, researching and meeting over 200 different families from a broad range of cultural backgrounds. We spent time with each person discovering their story and asking questions carefully, never revealing the precise motivations or narrative, so as not to lose the genuine moment of realisation when the grandparent and grandchild were finally interviewed together on camera.
Released in over twenty countries across Europe, it received two million views in the first two months, and has received over 3 millions combined views.