What is it like to have ALZEIMER´S

The threat of Alzheimer’s disease is growing rapidly in the Czech Republic, where it is estimated that up to half a million people will suffer from the disease by 2050. At the same time, there is an escalating competitive battle among companies providing services for patients with Alzheimer’s. Therefore, Alzheimercentrum joined with us so that we could help to distinguish it from other providers and jointly educate the public about the difficulties posed by this disease. And we did more than well! How did we go about it?*

 

On the occasion of the premiere of Still Alice, a film whose main character suffers from Alzheimer’s, we decided to disorient viewers at Febiofest for five minutes. By screening the wrong film, we attempted to put them in a state of disorientation similar to that experienced daily by Alzheimer’s sufferers. At the same time, we recorded the viewers’ reactions with a hidden camera. At the end of the experiment, the bewildered viewers could read the text: “Do you feel confused? That is how people with Alzheimer’s feel every day. Alzheimercentrum.” We invited to the event key journalists who, however, had no idea about our project. We chose this approach due to the enduring difficulty of asserting this issue in the media by means of standard PR tools.

 

In a very creative way, we thus succeeded in ensuring media space for the issue of Alzheimer’s disease and presenting Alzheimercentrum in the main media outlets such as iDNES.cz (homepage) and ČT 1 (Události). And we did all of that using a method that no one had ever previously applied in the Czech Republic. The non-traditional creative project, which cost CZK 20,000, achieved AVE of CZK 3 million, reached an audience of 10 million people and nearly crashed the client’s website due to the significant increase in traffic.

 

The successful project won first place in the 2015 Czech PR Awards in the News and Events category and first place in the Pharmacy, Health Care Sector category, as well as first place in the 2015 European Excellence Awards in the Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia category.