It’s not often you get to do amazing work for an unbelievable client, collaborate with A-list directors and save hundreds of thousands of lives at the same time. I ran the truth account at Arnold Worldwide as we partnered with CPB. I am pretty sure we created the “live stunts filmed as commercials” genre that are all too common today.
Tobacco companies hated it when truth exposed their dirty little secrets. So we took secret tobacco documents, blew them up 30 feet tall and placed them in public for all to see. We even put the body copy in public. None of this was photoshopped.
The idea with Infect truth was that knowledge is contagious, go spread it. So we gave teens interactive tools to get our message out to the world in unique ways.
Millions of cars get recalled. Baby car seats get recalled. Any defective product that even harms a consumer, let alone kills them is yanked off the shelves. Unless you sell cigarettes. Then all you have to do is put a warning label on them. This was the idea behind the world we’re still living in. Crazyworld.
The American Legacy Foundation, which funded the truth campaign, wanted an initiative that spoke to the number of women who die every year from tobacco-related diseases. So I came up with the goodbye letter idea. The women are real. Their letters are real. And to get their real, raw emotion, famed portrait photographer Richard Avedon shot these not long before his own death.