Four babies were dying every day from preventable causes. Not rare diseases, but missed checkups, lack of access, not knowing. You can’t brainstorm like usual with a topic that heavy. We spent days circling familiar metaphors: empty cribs, grayscale sadness and nothing rang true. There was no room for cleverness, only the urgency to find something honest and human.
So we flipped the question: if these deaths weren’t expected, someone was waiting. A mother. A room. Tiny clothes. Toys. If the baby never comes home, the toys keep waiting. And they mourn too. From there, the path was open: the idea was the message.
We built it in the real world. Partnered with top toy stores to place mourning toys in their windows. Not to provoke, but to interrupt, so people would stop in a place built for joy and feel something else. Strip everything down and hold onto the insight; the one thing that truly matters. Ten years later, it still holds because insight never goes out of style. And yes, it brought home a Cannes Lion.