When poos and jobbies are no laughing matter.

I attended a reception in Edinburgh last night, hosted by the IPA to celebrate 100 years of Public Service advertising.

It was a relatively dry and reverential affair, and Brian Coane of The Leith Agency, and the final speaker, maintained the gravitas of the event.

But he brought a smile to the room in his retelling of how what might seem an extremely dry, very important (critically so in fact) subject matter came to the screens (well, certainly the computer screens) of the middle aged Scottish public and their well meaning and caring children.

It was part of the campaign to nudge people to do their bowel screening test.

As he explained it, the brief reflected the gravitas of the task — after all, bowel cancer is a major killer of middle aged and elderly people, and bowel screening can dramatically improve outcomes if caught early.

The brief stated, as the core objective…

“To increase the proportion of people with stage 1 disease at diagnosis (as a proxy indicator of survival outcome) and to use performance against a HEAT Target as a lever for whole systems approach to improvement.”

…and was translated, in creative and communications terms, as…

‘Don’t be snobby test your jobby’

The room laughed and the target audience did the same when they saw this exposition of the brief.

Good work from The Leith Agency, brilliantly told by Brian.

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