Cannes Lions : UI designer Lucie Marcel explains her favorite campaign

How can one brand overshadow another, only to lead it into the light?

At a time when all the cards are being shuffled in our industry, some campaigns still manage to surprise us with their ingenuity and creativity. Dramamine’s THE LAST BARF BAG campaign, presented and awarded at Cannes Lions, particularly caught my eye, thanks to the thoughtfulness with which it was approached.

For its 75th anniversary, Dramamine, the number one brand of medication for preventing and treating motion sickness, is working with FCB Chicago to promote the effectiveness of its products in a surprising way.
In fact, for the brand, which is already known and recognised for its effectiveness, there is no need to highlight its product. So it decided to highlight an everyday object that had fallen victim to the success of Dramamine drugs: vomit bags. Paradoxically, these two products were launched in the same year, 1949, to help people suffering from nausea in two completely different ways.

The Last Barf Bag campaign was born of this observation. A number of activations were then put in place.
The documentary The Last Barf Bag began the tribute to vomit bags. Drawing on testimonies from collectors, flight attendants, doctors, historians and many others, it provides a very interesting analysis of the decline in popularity of these bags from multiple points of view.

To continue, a poster campaign features the documentary’s key players promoting the film.Then it was off to Broadway for the highlight of the show: a museum dedicated to exhibiting these vomit bags was opened. This initiative elevates the craziest collectors’ items to the status of works of art. To round off this tribute, an e-commerce site called This is not a barf bag  was launched, offering new vomit bags for sale with a variety of different uses: a bag could become a flower pot, an envelope, or even a coloring game for children.

Following this campaign, Amazon sales of the drug rose by 26% (source: CBNEWS).

Humour is, of course, a tricky thing to pull off, and should only be used occasionally by brands that don’t use it as part of their DNA. The Dramamine campaign has achieved a real tour de force by employing this lever under its status as a drug brand, a very restricted sector in terms of communication with the general public. It has succeeded brilliantly in getting its message across, creating a memorable and original campaign that encourages everyone to take care of themselves.