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December 2006 - Strategy Magazine
Deconstructed

Psychosiphobia

by Annette Bourdeau
page 17

Coining a term is an ambitious creative concept to support, but that didn't faze Vancouver's Grey Worldwide Northwest, which recently launched an integrated campaign for Coast Mental Health. The campaign centres on the invented word "psychosiphobia" - fear of the mentally ill.

"Mental illness is a topic most people are uncomfortable with," says CD Craig Redmond, on the insight behind the campaign. "We decided to challenge people's prejudiced perceptions."

Three print executions - set on a park bench, in an elevator and diner - feature people keeping their distance from a mentally ill person. A radio spot spoofs serious PSAs, with a female announcer outlining all the symptoms of "psychosiphobia." All efforts drive users to the microsite, www.psychosiphobia.com. The creatives even did a Wikipedia entry for the word.

The campaign also includes OOH, online, guerrilla and TV, and rolled out throughout the fall (the TV launched late last month, and wasn't available at press time).

The street component involved painting the new word at the corner of Vancouver's Seymour and East Hastings streets, the line between the good and bad sides of town, and street teams handed out info about mental illness.

We asked Rob Tarry, ACD at Vancouver's Rethink, and Brian Howlett, CD/partner at Toronto's AMW to weigh in on whether psychosiphobia works for them.

Concept

BH: The idea that those who are uncomfortable around the mentally ill suffer from their own disorder is a novel start point. Coming up with a term for it - "psychosiphobia" - seems like the logical next step. But it's an ambitious idea, and the creative team has set itself up for a huge challenge.

RT: Everything rests on the shoulders of this word pulled from thin air - an unreadable word at that. This makes for a very shaky structure, and makes it a campaign about an idea rather than a campaign about mental illness. And if people simply don't get the idea (show your friends and neighbours), the rest of the discussion is pretty academic.

Print

BH: In terms of the executions, I love the photography, and the woman on the bench is the clearest expression of the concepts, in that the young girl is being moved away from a mentally ill person. However, the guy in the diner looks like he might be a trucker at the end of a long shift; and the people in the elevator haven't obviously distanced themselves from the guy, they're simply in a different elevator.

Finally, I understand they want to hammer home the word, "psychosiphobia," that's at the heart of the campaign, but smearing it across the visual certainly belabours the point.

RT: If nothing else, let's all agree on this: no more ads set in retro diners. Or park benches. Here the tag line might've clarified things a bit, but I think it means "Even though you suffer from mysispoanxcnfcofhaflophobia, the mentally ill have it way worse, buddy." Well, colour me chastised, I guess.

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