One in five people suffer from migraine. But most people think it’s ‘just a strong headache’. How could you understand what it’s like unless you've experienced migraine yourself?

Excedrin, the head pain medication, wanted to help sufferers show the world how debilitating migraine can be, by allowing people who don’t suffer migraine to experience it first hand.

To show that Excedrin understands the world through the eyes of a migraine sufferer, we built the world’s first migraine simulator.

Understanding that migraine symptoms are personal, we teamed sufferers with virtual reality developers to create an experience that mirrors their exact symptoms.

Using a custom built rig, based on Oculus Rift, we challenged friends, family and co-workers of migraine sufferers to experience the exact migraine the sufferer sees ‘through their eyes’.

By filming the experiment, we were able to transform people’s knowledge of migraine worldwide, making Excedrin truly the ‘head pain expert’.

We were tasked with creating digital content to raise awareness of migraine and strategically communicate Excedrin’s brand position as ‘the head pain expert’, the empathetic expert that truly understands migraine sufferers.

Our challenge was to build on the brand’s ‘through the eyes’ creative platform, a technique that uses a first-person, point of view perspective in Excedrin’s above-the-line advertising, to demonstrate empathy and understanding of the full range of migraine symptoms.

The content produced therefore had to reinforce the brand’s above-the-line strategy while also providing unique and shareable digital assets that further enhanced the brand’s ‘empathetic expert’ proposition.

All volunteers that took part in the experiment said that without this experience they would have never known how severe migraine really is.

Alongside this, we surveyed a cross-section of 441 people who saw the finished video:

• 88% of respondents said it increased their understanding of migraine. More surprisingly, 80% of migraine sufferers themselves even said it increased their understanding.

• 92% of people felt more sympathetic to migraine sufferers after watching the video and 60% of migraine sufferers said that the video made them more likely to recommend Excedrin to another migraine sufferer.

The experiment was so successful Excedrin is streamlining the technology to be used as a sales aid and demonstration kit at press launches and trade shows. The brand also plans to take the kit on the road, allowing the public to experience it for themselves.

As pain relief for migraine, all of Excedrin’s communication aims to demonstrate empathy and understanding for migraine sufferers.

We chose to use innovative technology to help sufferers demonstrate to others how bad their condition really is. The migraine simulator allows suffers, for the first time ever, to really show the public what they go through; whilst communicating to people that Excedrin is the empathetic expert and raising awareness of migraine, as well as increasing brand awareness.

The experiment was filmed and uploaded to the brand’s YouTube channel, with traffic driven to the videos using paid media including pre-rolls and display advertising, as well as a dedicated page on the brand’s website. The campaign just recently launched in Poland in April with a global roll out to follow.