2025 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

The Hospital for Sick Children (known as SickKids) is celebrating its 150-year anniversary in 2025. With this big milestone came big ambitions, and the hospital wanted to drum up as much excitement as possible in order to encourage more support and more donations for SickKids.

While the goal was to recruit new donors, donors were not the brand’s specific audience — humans were. And, as the #2 pediatric hospital in the world, SickKids’ target stretches outside of its local borders.

The reality is that in 2025, the world feels like an especially tough place for humans. Everywhere you turn, there’s heaviness and stress. They don’t know what the future holds anymore, and it feels like there’s a new “unprecedented crisis” every other week. But donations, to any cause, are down.

As a society, we are becoming desensitized to all the issues in the world, and feel like our dollars won’t be enough to make a difference. If that is, we believe we have the extra dollars to spare to begin with.

In other words, the agency needed a campaign that would reinvigorate the love for a 150-year-old brand, and encourage hospital donations during a time when people are being more frugal with their wallets than ever.

SickKids needed a powerful human truth that would break through today’s culture of apathy and inspire people to donate to the hospital. And the truth is: the past is not that motivating, nor is it creatively interesting. SickKids’ history is impressive, but to focus on its previous achievements made it feel like the job was done. There was no reason to open your heart or wallet, because clearly the brand was already doing fine without you.

Instead, the agency needed to focus on the future and give the brand’s audience a reason to feel compelled to help. To give them something to fight for. To give them a reason to care about SickKids’ 150th anniversary. To turn that reason into donations that would support the next 150 years.

And so their universal, strategic insight became incredibly clear. This campaign is about birthdays. Not SickKids’ birthday, but the birthday that every single patient at SickKids is already fighting for their next one.

Every child deserves a next birthday. Fight for Every Birthday.

The video-led campaign features 23 real-life SickKids patients, uses athletic training imagery as a metaphor to show that these kids are literally in a fight for their lives — reaching their next birthday is the goal that SickKids, and you, can help them achieve. It’s a powerful visual and creative approach that lends itself to motivating storytelling at every moment of the donor journey.

SickKids' 150th anniversary was the catalyst. But the real story remained focused exactly where it needed to be: fighting to save the lives of its patients, so that they can get to that next birthday.

The biggest strategic challenge with this campaign, the agency’s first, centred around the VS platform, and if and how they would evolve it to move the SickKids story forward. It made sense to build upon VS, arguably the most famous healthcare platform on the planet, but it was not that simple. Ultimately, the agency decided to evolve VS through a shift in tone as opposed to a departure.

VS has always been about the fighting spirit. Strategically, they decided to shift the focal point of the fight. In earlier VS work, the tone was very much about what the hospital and the patients were fighting against (i.e. cancer). It was powerful, but as time went on, it put a little too much focus on the enemy. To move the brand and the platform forward, they wanted to shift the fight to be more about what the hospital and patients are fighting for.

Obviously, the dichotomy of fighting for and fighting against something is by no means mutually exclusive and very much two sides of the same coin, so it was more about recalibrating the tone to be a little more about one over the other rather than a marked departure.

The campaign launched on April 3, 2025, and while donation results are still pending, public response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“The Count” proved emotionally gripping, reflected in initial results that drove significant engagement across multiple channels. The brand film accumulated 726K views across all platforms, earned media generated 72 million impressions from 189 pieces of coverage, and organic social contributed an additional
1.54 million impressions.

Since 2016, SickKids’ “VS” platform has been arguably the most famous healthcare advertising on the planet. It bravely defied category tropes, featuring child patients not as sad victims to be pitied, but as strong fighters to be rallied behind.

It was important that the campaign stay in “fight mode,” but culturally, at this moment in time, it felt like there was a need for more positivity. The future is a scary concept right now, and no one needs to feel like there is yet another thing that they’re fighting against. So their strategy evolved from fighting against an enemy to fighting to work toward a goal.

Credits

Client: SickKids Foundation
CMO: Heather Clark
VP, Head of Brand, Content & Communications: Kate Torrance
Director, Brand Marketing Management: Roy Gruia
Director, Public Relations & Communications: Sandra Chiovitti
Associate Director, Brand Marketing: Jessica Myers
Associate Director, Brand Strategy, Governance & Production: Tina Tieu-Lafrance
Associate Director, Public Relations: Tania Kwong
Manager, Integrated Brand Marketing: Joanna Yu
Manager, Brand Strategy, Governance & Production: Anne Hernandez
Coordinator, Brand Strategy, Governance & Production: Melody Zhang
Manager, Public Relations & Stakeholder Relations: Taylor Huff
Associate, Community Stakeholder Relations: Kylie White
Coordinator, Community Stakeholder Relations: Dymond Phillip
Agency: FCB Canada
CCO: Nancy Crimi-Lamanna
EVP, Global Creative Partner: Danilo Boer
ECD: Andrew MacPhee
ACD's: Jacob Pacey, Brendan McMullen
Copywriters: Jacob Pacey, Reena Feldman
Art Directors: Brendan McMullen, Erika Jee
EVP, General Manager: Tracy Little
GAD: Rose Noble
Account Supervisor: Sophie Seidelin
Head of Corporate Communications and Reputation: Tim Welsh
Associate Director, Global Communications & Content: Emilie Sharp
CSO: Shelley Brown
VP, Strategy Director: Shelagh Hartford
VP, Broadcast Production: Sarah Michener
Senior Broadcast Producer: Tess Waisglass
Production: Iconoclast
Director: Clément Durou
Executive Producer: Charles Marie Anthonioz
Production Service: Merchant
Executive Producer: Ian Webb
Producer: Maryna Petrenko
Director of Photography: Shady Hanna
Edit: Work Editorial
Editor, Longform: Neil Smith
Cutting assistant-Longform, Editor -:60 & :30: Fatos Marishta
Producer: Victor Medina
Head of Production: Chris Delarenal
EP: Alejandra Alarcon
Managing Director: Erica Thompson
Sound by Soundtree Music
VFX and Colour by ARC Creative
Casting: Powerhouse Casting