The Last Photo demonstrates the extraordinary power of a simple idea that reveals a surprising, and in this case devastating, truth.

To make their point, most creative ideas stretch or hyperbolise the truth. The Last Photo simply revealed it.

Designed to reignite a national conversation, the campaign heightened people’s awareness of suicide and simultaneously lessened its stigma.

But most importantly, The Last Photo saved lives. CALM’s service demand has increased by 38%, leading to the prevention of 161 deaths and counting.

161 reasons to believe that one idea can bring about meaningful change.

In 2018, we created Project 84 for mental health partners CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) and ITV (UK’s largest commercial TV station) putting suicide firmly on the national agenda.

Six years later, following years of Covid lockdowns and an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, the UK suicide rate was rising at an unprecedented rate. New data revealed that 125 people were taking their own lives, every week.

Talking can save lives. But people weren’t talking.

The isolation caused by the pandemic desensitised the public to rising mortality figures, regardless of their cause. Just stating the problem wasn’t enough.

Long-term mental health partners ITV & CALM sought to create a new kind of campaign that would humanise the statistics, by showing what “suicidal behaviour” really looks like. Not just to raise awareness, or to shock, but to incite action. To get people to ask “Are you really ok?”

People think they know what suicidal people look like: crying, desperate, defeated.

But the truth is far from that. People closest to them don’t always realise they need to know to look deeper.

In response, we created The Last Photo. In a broadcast first, ITV - the UK’s largest commercial TV station, in partnership with CALM - launched a gut-wrenching campaign. On “The happiest day of the year”, a central London portrait exhibition was revealed featuring pictures of happy, smiling, young people. ITV leveraged the power and reach of prime time show “This Morning” to reveal that these were the final photographs ever taken of people who had died by suicide.

With the simple message: “Suicidal doesn’t always look suicidal.”

The idea was designed, timed and placed to draw unprecedented media attention to the issue, triggering a conversation to match the scale of the UK’s suicide crisis.

We needed to equip the United Kingdom to prevent suicides by:

Educating people about suicidal behaviour.

Providing practical tools for intervention.

Our approach began with a months-long process of interviewing people who had lost loved ones to suicide.

We took care to approach minority groups amongst whom suicide is taboo, yet causes disproportionately more deaths.

One statement recurred, “We had no idea they were feeling suicidal”. This lead to our strategy “Suicidal doesn’t always look suicidal”.

As a universal problem, the target audience was intentionally broad.

We designed the campaign to deliver a simple, emotional message to resonate with all demographics.

Our trigger moment was a ‘reveal’ on ITV’s live programming planned for maximum media coverage.

TVC ran across TV and Cinema, broadening reach.

Outdoor, press executions and social targeted specific audiences.

On “The happiest day of the year”, 50 large photos of happy people appeared on London’s Southbank. No logos. No information other than a name and age.

Once the exhibition piqued interest, it was announced live on ITV’s national show, This Morning. They were the last photos of suicidal people.

A 90 second film launched mid-programme featuring people’s last videos. Later, it moved TV and cinema audiences.

QR codes turned the exhibition interactive with poignant family interviews.

ITV harnessed its flagship daytime programming and celebrity talent to keep the conversation going among millions of viewers with daily phone-ins and debate.

PR focused on the bereaved as well as ITV and CALM’s ambassadors.

Outdoor and press targeted cities and the communities where the subjects once lived.

Across every touchpoint, we directed visitors to practical suicide prevention tools.

The primary goal was to kickstart a national conversation about the true nature of suicide. In that, it was an unprecedented success.

The exhibition itself was seen by over 7.5 million live on ITV's This Morning.

500,000+ visited in person.

Throughout the week, individuals left unprompted photos of their deceased loved ones to join the event.

We achieved 1.6 billion impressions, triggering a rise in online conversations around suicide rose by 33%.

For 48 hours following launch, the campaign film was the most talked-about video on Reddit, globally - sparking a huge, constructive conversation about suicidal behaviour.

The campaign led to a 400% YoY increase in donations to CALM.

Most importantly, in the 6 months following the campaign, CALM prevented 161 suicides.

While conversations around general mental health have recently become more open, suicide is still a heavily stigmatised and deeply misunderstood topic in British culture.

And yet, with 125 people dying each week and 1 in 5 Britons claiming to have had suicidal thoughts, its effects are felt everywhere.

As the UK’s largest commercial TV station, ITV sees tackling this as one of its core CSR targets.

Given the British public’s reluctance to talk about suicide openly, disruptive and headline-grabbing campaigns are one of the strongest tools at our disposal to force the topic into national conversation.

This agenda forms the basis of ITV’s partnership with CALM - a partnership which has yielded some of the world’s most effective and creative campaigns to improve the nation’s mental wellbeing and prevent suicide.