Good Work AND Work for Good
Decades of behavior change work, and what it takes to do it right
When I got the chance to interview at Drake Cooper in 2008, I did what you do. I went poking around the agency’s history.
The public health work is what got me. It ended up being one of the main reasons I took the job. Campaigns on teen drinking and tobacco prevention, a lot of it already years old by then. It didn’t just hold up. It was better than plenty of the national work that was in the national market at the time.
Over my long tenure here, I’ve had plenty of time to see whether that first impression held up. It has.
It was never a practice area
DC has been operating for nearly fifty years, and behavior change work runs through almost all of it. Teen drinking. Teen pregnancy. Tobacco. Suicide prevention. Rural opioid stigma. Fentanyl.
The industry formalized this fairly recently. Cannes didn’t have a health category at all until 2014, when it launched Lions Health and split it into Pharma and Health & Wellness. Four years later, it added the Sustainable Development Goals Lions in partnership with the United Nations, and the ANA put Brand Purpose on its official growth agenda for CMOs the same year.
Plenty of shops were doing good work in this space long before any of that. The point isn’t that we were early. It’s that we’ve been at it continuously, through several different eras of what the industry thought mattered.
Nobody’s buying anything
Most advertising asks you to buy something. Almost everything on that list asks you to do something differently, which is a much harder ask.
Nobody really wakes up hoping to be sold anything, if we’re being honest. But at least with a product, there’s a want to work with. Here, there’s no product. There’s just a behavior that’s easier to leave alone, and an audience with every reason to tune you out.
Idahoans especially. Independent, self-reliant, proud of where they live, famously allergic to being told what to do. Lecture an Idahoan, and you’re finished. Which means most anti-anything advertising tricks have never been available to us. We’ve had to take the long way around, over and over.
And here’s the part that took me longest to get comfortable with. The best possible outcome of this work is somebody making a decision they may never mention to anybody.
The scoreboard’s different, too. Most advertising gets measured against a purchase. Somebody bought it, or they didn’t. Clean scoreboard, easy to argue about. A health agency isn’t closing a sale. An office of drug policy isn’t competing for wallet.
So how do you know if it worked?
How you know it worked
In 2021, we built a campaign for the Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline. Murals. Local artists, donated wall space, messages painted at a scale nobody can scroll past. Reach Out. You Are Not Alone. It’s OK To Ask For Help.
Call volume to the hotline went up. But the thing I remember came on one of our last calls with the client, when they mentioned, almost in passing, that people phoning the hotline had been bringing up the murals.
I watched people from our agency get choked up on that call. Lose their words a little. Not because we’d hit a number. Because somebody out there had named the specific thing that got them to pick up the phone, at a moment, they needed to pick up the phone.
We’ll never know who they were. We shouldn’t. That’s the arrangement, and it’s still one of the moments I’m most proud of in my career.
The stuff I get to point at
The early work. Peer-focused campaigns for Idaho youth on drinking and teen pregnancy, plus Project Filter for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, a long-running statewide tobacco cessation and prevention effort.
Fentanyl, for the Office of the Governor. We built the statewide “All It Takes” platform, and we still run it. Two milligrams can kill an adult. Most Idahoans didn’t know that. Message awareness reached 60% of teens, 83% of young adults, and 97% of parents, and 87% of all traffic to the campaign’s resource site came from the advertising itself, which means the work didn’t just get seen. It sent people looking. Between May 2023 and May 2024, Idaho’s drug overdose deaths fell 7.81%1, according to CDC counts by jurisdiction, while neighboring states went the other way.
We didn’t do that. Emergency departments, treatment centers, and county coalitions bear the brunt of this. What we did was help. On work like this, helping is the job. This year’s chapter, “All It Takes Is a Pause,” is in market now.
Welcome to the Unaltered State, for Idaho Public Television. Strategy, name, and brand identity for a statewide teen substance use prevention platform funded by the Idaho Millennium Fund, with the Governor’s Office of Drug Policy among its named partners. Built on connection instead of fear, on purpose, and carrying a coalition of more than thirty statewide and community partners.
Be There, for the Rural Communities Opioid Response Program. A campaign and a customizable partner toolkit built to cut stigma around opioid recovery, because in rural communities, stigma keeps people from treatment about as reliably as distance does. The toolkit’s available across all fifty states now.
Give Us The Floor. Our current Dream Big client is a nonprofit supporting 2SLGBTQIA+ youth and allies nationwide, ages 13 to 24, through a free app that hosts confidential, anonymous, youth-facilitated peer support groups, backed by a team with clinical mental health expertise. They describe themselves as not just a safe space but a brave space, which is a line I think about a lot.
And it isn’t all Idaho. We’ve worked on menstrual health for young women in impoverished regions of Africa and Asia, and on a campaign arguing that the World Health Organization should recognize oxygen as an essential medicine, which it is, and which most of the world cannot reliably get.
Rules we wrote down
We wrote our approach to sensitive topics down a while ago. Worth a read if you do this kind of work. Three parts of it matter more than the rest.
+ We don’t do politics. We communicate the what, not the why. The information somebody needs to make a decision, not the argument about whether they should care. The why is subjective and rooted in personal belief, and it belongs in political discourse rather than in our work. That sounds like a limitation. In practice, it’s what makes this work usable by a public agency at all.
+ Nobody gets assigned these projects. That’s an actual policy. Sensitive topics take a real emotional toll, so only people who believe in the cause and are prepared for it work on them.
+ And we push. The creative has to be bold enough to get through, which means some clients who want something safer aren’t the right fit for this part of our business. We say that out loud in the document, which I’ve always appreciated.
Why people keep raising their hand
Watch what folks here post on their own channels. The stuff they pick themselves, on a Saturday, with their own caption. It skews heavily toward this work, and it always has. Which is a strange thing when you sit with it. The people this work helps will never know we made it. But it’s the work our team most wants their name near.
Patrick Hoopes, our executive creative director, went on The One Club for Creativity’s Morning Buzz during Creative Week in New York and spent his airtime talking about the importance of doing good work AND work for good, which are two different things that have to happen at the same time. He gets on his soapbox around the thirty-minute mark if you want to hear it.
Work for good without good work is a press release. Good work without work for good is a portfolio piece. Getting both at once, on a subject where somebody’s wellbeing is the variable, is the hardest and best thing this business has to offer.
There’s a particular feeling that comes from making something that helps somebody you’ll never meet, in a town you might never visit, on a day you’ll never hear about.
It’s one of the reasons I’m still here. And I think it’s why a lot of us love this business we’re in. We can make things that matter.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts, by jurisdiction. 12-month ending period, May 2023 to May 2024. ↩︎