Team Heart Safety - Philips | Clapboard Ad Archive

Philips’ Team Heart Safety campaign, created by Ogilvy in 2019, delivers a technical and purposeful intervention in the healthcare category, using the Eindhoven Marathon as a stage to demonstrate the urgency and accessibility of Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) in urban environments. By equipping three marathon runners with interactive LED shirts that displayed the real-time distance to the nearest AED along the route, Philips tackled the widespread public inattention to the critical six-minute window for effective response to cardiac emergencies—a concept fundamental to city health infrastructure yet almost invisible in daily life. The campaign’s strategic brilliance lies in harnessing the marathon context, a moment when cardiovascular health concerns are highly salient, to communicate the often-abstract importance of emergency preparedness in a viscerally clear, dynamic, and participatory manner. For both runners and spectators, the shirts’ live data projections transformed a theoretical public health issue into a tangible and actionable reality, making proximity to life-saving equipment not just information but experience; in doing so, Philips reframed itself from an AED manufacturer to a proactive facilitator of safer, more responsive cities. This activation sits squarely in what Clapboard’s taxonomy classifies as FORMAT#1—Demonstration, using real-world proof over narrative or celebrity, and eschewing metaphor or abstraction in favor of direct, transparent functionality. The agency’s use of live technology—marrying VFX with physical endurance sport—amplified the immediate utility of Philips’ proposition while fostering a sense of individual empowerment within a collective event, yielding a blueprint for health brands seeking to bridge their product’s practical value with citywide impact. On a competitive axis, Team Heart Safety sidestepped the technical or clinical messaging favored by Medtronic or GE Healthcare, opting instead for public engagement rooted in behavioral insight and clarity, with an activation that brought the idea of the six-minute zone into the public imagination through sheer visibility on the city’s streets. The campaign earns 71/100 in Clapboard’s global creative archive. As brands in healthcare pivot toward more public-facing engagement and city-scale interventions, campaigns like Team Heart Safety signal how the most meaningful innovation lies in making critical health technology visible, actionable, and intertwined with everyday urban experience.