To educate and interrupt a younger audience about the effects of Alzheimer’s, we partnered with Shazam and gave the app the debilitating symptoms of the disease. When users started to Shazam music, the app began to stutter, stumble and forget, giving them a hard-hitting insight into the daily struggles people suffering from Alzheimer’s have to face. Our call to action then sent users to the Alzheimer’s Research UK donation page.

We bought 3 ad spaces on Shazam. The 'listening' screen, 'Shazam again' screen and 'follow up banner' screen.

For the listening screen, we developed GIFs which played out line after line underneath Shazam's native 'listening' prompt. The copy was based around the idea that Shazam couldn't remember the song it was listening to. We also mirrored the background of our ad space to that of the Shazam user interface, so that users would truly believe the app had started to forget.

For the Shazam again and Preview screens, we created 3 frame GIFs which showed our call to action which, when clicked, would take users to the Alzheimer's Research UK donation page.

The ads ran over 2 days and were seen by 2,018,206 users.

The campaign achieved 2,018,206 impressions. And Alzheimer’s Research UK received 5,096 visitors to their donation page directly from the banner ads.

Shazam as a media channel has never been used in this way before. By creating ads that appear native to the app by mirroring our ads to the existing user interface, we have essentially created what looks like a part of Shazam, hacking the ad placements to deliver a hard hitting message about Alzheimer's. Due to Shazam's function as being able to recognise, or in our case 'remember' songs, its plays perfectly into our idea. It's one of the only channels that an idea like this works perfectly in context.

In order to target and interrupt a younger, more digital audience, we conceived a native message in an environment where millions of young people spend time in every day - an app like Shazam.

Shazam's sole purpose is to recognise, 'remember' songs. It gave us the perfect platform for us to mimic the symptoms of the condition. An unexpected way of dramatising the effects to an unaware audience.

As our ads looked native to the app, they would've taken our unsuspecting audience by surprise and delivered them a hard hitting message in a place they never would have thought they would be targeted.

Most people think that memory loss, one of the main symptoms of dementia, caused by Alzheimer’s disease, only affects those in later life. But the disease can actually affect people as young as 40 years of age. With over 40,000 people under 65 living with dementia in the UK alone. How can we educate an increasingly digital younger audience on the effects of Alzheimer's disease?