Headway. Action for Brain Injury Week 2025 / Their strongest performing awareness campaign
Role: Art direction, design, edit.
Context
Action for Brain Injury Week (ABI Week) is Headway’s annual awareness push of the real, fluctuating challenges of living with brain injury. After my agency had worked with Headway in 2023, they were asked back and this campaign became Headway’s strongest performing ever, with over 125,000 video views, 620,000+ impressions and deep social engagement.
Our challenge: show what life is really like for survivors — not just the “good days,” but the hard ones too. So we created a dual narrative: on a good day and on a bad day.
The creative concept of alternating “good day / bad day” storytelling allowed people to understand how unpredictable symptoms of a brain injury can be.
To make this contrast very visually immediate I decided on a split screen approach. Juxtaposing the good days as clear and focussed and the bad, as heavily pixelated to represent the breakdown of functioning for survivors on the days when they struggle.
We wanted to use real people and experiences throughout the campaign as authenticity was particularly important here, so we requested user generated imagery and videos from real brain injury survivors. I took this content, supplied by participants, and edited it into emotionally honest films, weaving personal voices and raw moments into coherent narrative arcs. I shaped pacing, tone, cut decisions and transitions so the final films felt sensitive, respectful and immediate.
Main campaign film.
Combining the stories of the three very different participants into one narrative designed to raise awareness of the impacts of brain injury.
Individual films
Each participant had an individual film made, each very tonally different and very true to them as people. Katie’s was pragmatic, straightforward and matter-of-fact, Lorna’s was beautifully evocative, positive and heart-breaking all at the same time and Raj’s showed an individual who was more obviously changed by his injury but again, so full of emotion and personality.
creative approach & challenges
Working with user-generated content is unpredictable: with huge variations in video quality, tone, and structure. A big part of my role here was to find ways around those challenges, stitching together the footage with a strong graphic framework to create films which felt real, cohesive and truthful.
I had to keep consistency across formats, from the films themselves, to social cuts, digital assets and posters, ensuring the tone and look matched across the campaign and looking the other way on image resolution – it added to the authenticity anyway.
Given the sensitivity of the subject, I edited with lots of empathy, letting the voices of survivors lead, and staying true to their experience.
Impact & reach
The campaign’s reach was unprecedented for ABI Week: 620,000+ combined social impressions, 125,000+ video views.
It broke through into hard-to-reach spaces: organisations doing work capability assessments for the DWP shared it internally, and it reached clinical and non-clinical decision-makers.
In Parliament, two survivors spoke to MPs during the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on acquired brain injury — a direct result of the campaign visibility.
Supporting social assets
As well as cutdown film assets for social we also created carousels which quickly and succinctly got over the key campaign message. As well as the hero participants we also involved many more brain injury survivors from across the country many of which were used across social channels to further support the campaign and the diversity of symptoms and challenges.
This project pushed me as an editor and creative storyteller. Working with real voices and imperfect footage, I had to find integrity in every cut, every pause, every transition. I feel proud of how we gave visibility to stories that are too often overlooked.