How Ogilvy Taiwan paired dementia and fashion

In a competitive year for the PR Awards Asia, for which the full list of winners was announced today, Ogilvy Taiwan’s REmemory campaign bagged the Grand Prix award as Campaign of the Year.

For this public awareness campaign, Ogilvy was tasked to aid the Taiwan Alzheimer Disease Association on a campaign to educate the public about dementia. In Taiwan, it was found that people aged 18 to 39 have the lowest awareness of dementia, because the disease feels distant to them. So the agency’s mission was to draw young people’s attention to the issue and get them involved within a budget of US$17,910. Of this amount, 91% was allocated to creative planning and material production, 3% for press events, and 6% for media advertising.

To bring the idea to life, the team leveraged a local cultural insight: a viral phenomenon that recently took place in Taiwan where a third-generation owner of a dry cleaner mixed and matched clothes left behind in his shop, creating fashionable retro outfits for his grandparents. Using forgotten clothes at dry cleaners all over Taiwan, Ogilvy aimed to do two things. First, to overturn the negative connotation of ‘forgetting’ and activating it with creativity by proving that age and disease are no barriers to having fun with fashion. Secondly, it aimed to redefine the concept of fashion, as this style of retro clothing was especially gaining traction among young people.

To execute the idea, the team launched an online shop to sell the forgotten clothes as a way to present life stories of those with dementia. The clothes are then delivered to customers, packaged in a REmemory box along with stories of people with dementia, as well as access to an online course about the illness. Five pop-up booths in boutique clothing stores were also launched, where 12 celebrities were invited to unbox their REmemory boxes on social media.

At the end of the campaign period, REmemory gained 30 positive news pieces, TV reports, and digital coverage across Taiwan while media coverage of the Taiwan Alzheimer Disease Association grew by 190%. The campaign also received 93.3% positive comments on social media with 69,627 engagements, resulting in a spike of donations by 44.7% compared to 2021.

As a bonus, a recent Instagram trend report revealed that nearly one in four young people expect to thrift online on second-hand websites and hope to contribute more to clothing sustainability via online platforms or social media. While it might be difficult to link increased awareness about thrift shopping directly to this campaign, it’s certainly a nice outcome regardless.

See all winners of the PR Awards Asia 2022.