There are more and more charities competing for the nation’s heart strings Here’s how we helped the Heart Foundation raise more money and save more lives than ever before.

Heart disease kills more New Zealanders than anything else. What makes this sad truth even worse is that many deaths would be preventable if people knew the symptoms of a heart attack.

The problem is the landscape is littered with charities tugging at people’s heart strings, not to mention hundreds of health messages competing for their attention.

Despite these challenges, the Heart Foundation asked us to increase awareness of symptoms and change behaviour. With an audience in denial and a limited budget, it was clear that we couldn’t take a “normal” approach to social marketing.

Rather than lecture them, we used TVCs and social media to turn our message into something they couldn’t resist: a challenge.

We created a TVC featuring ordinary Kiwis demonstrating what they thought a heart attack looked like. However, a man in the background was experiencing the banal yet serious symptoms of the real thing. The outtake was clear: a heart attack is not as dramatic as you think.

We followed up the Heart Attack Act TVC with a Heart Week appeal featuring Ian Lancaster, a man who credited his survival of a heart attack to seeing the TVC and recognizing the symptoms.

Every woman knows about the dangers of breast cancer, yet many don't know that they are almost five times more likely to die from heart disease. So to draw attention to this fact and give it some perspective, we compared the two.