The cancer unboxing experience is not good.
There are no instructions, it’s not fun to play with, and there’s absolutely no way to put it back in the box.
But, I’ve been a creative director for a long time and usually, when dealing with a product that everybody hates, I’ve found that the problem is often not the product itself, but the way we tell its story. As a marketer, it’s my job to find the product’s hidden benefits and craft a campaign that communicates them in an impactful way.
So, that’s what I did when I found out I had stage 4 metastatic cancer.
It happened a couple years ago, while we were emerging from the pandemic. I was absolutely fine, but in an effort to join the movement of less wine swilling, less sitting down, and more social humans, I went to the doctor. I’ve never been a doctor person, and as someone who exercised regularly and had spent half my life as a vegetarian, I appeared to be in good health. When the doctor recommended a colonoscopy because I was 45, I was psyched. It fit right in with my intention of getting a clean bill of health and feeling good about myself after a global era of illness.
When I awoke from my procedure, I asked the doctor if he “always played so much yacht rock during colonoscopies.” He responded, “Mr. Phillips, I think you have cancer.”
In case you’re wondering, that is NOT how you’re supposed to get that news. Alas, within days, I was told that my cancer was inoperable and I had, at maximum, a year to live.
Diagnosing a new identity
They can only give you the news that you’re dying once. From that moment on, dying becomes a way of life. It didn’t matter that within three months of being given this prognosis I shocked the oncologists and was soon heading to a surgery they had said wasn’t possible. You can’t unhear “you’re dying.” And the thing you wouldn’t know unless you’ve lived this particular subreddit is that the disease itself isn’t the challenging part. It had been there for years while I went about my life. It didn’t hurt or anything. What I was struggling with was the Diagnosis.
I had been newly infected with the idea of cancer. When my doctor told me I may have less than a year to live, I was everything I always had been. I still owned an advertising agency. I had too many meetings the next day, like any day. I had school drop-offs. I had to make dinner. But now, I had to fit cancer into my schedule too. It was like squeezing a book that’s just a little too thick onto a bookshelf.
The Diagnosis was now part of my identity. I was a sick person, part of a marginalized community. I had to advocate for myself for the first time ever. It would be infused in everyone’s memory of me, it would inform how my two little girls fight or fear the world. The physical pain never scared me. I knew that treatment would be brutal. I didn’t know how long it would last or how it would end, but I could deal with it. The hours I would spend lying awake would be struggling not with what I had, but who I had become.
When people say there is no cure for your cancer, they’re talking about the disease that destroys your body. But, the more time I spent in my new identity, I started to think that maybe there is a cure for the Diagnosis—the idea that ravages your mind. The cure is marketing. Shifting perception from a product we hate to a benefit we just don’t see yet.
Curing the Diagnosis was the hardest brief I’d ever gotten, but that’s what makes great work. I needed to sell myself on cancer. I needed to show my girls how to navigate life at its most desperate. I needed to change my mind. My liver was Swiss cheese and I would leave that to the doctors. But, I could focus on the marketing problem. Cancer was an opportunity. I would work as an agency of one, for an audience of one. I was the strategist, creative, client, and target. I had to uncover the value of dying. I needed to creative direct my cancer. And maybe I could find a cure. Not just for my Diagnosis, but for advertising itself.
An impossible creative brief
“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”
Westley’s read on life in The Princess Bride is one of my favorite descriptions of advertising. Traditionally, advertising is the art of the aspirational, and that’s why it’s the only thing that’s made me puke more than chemo. Advertising feels fake when it pretends that we all exist in a diverse community where all cakes are moist and everything is going to work out. Our minds reject the idea of a life without pain. And more importantly, a life without pain is boring.
What advertising has almost never understood is that pain is the key ingredient of a good story. Why is every Disney movie star a hero with dead parents? Because pain is where heroes are born. Without pain and suffering, Bambi is just a cute deer who can talk, but she has nothing interesting to say. But, with the advantage of a devastating challenge, she is the deer who survived. A legend.
If pain is so important and so pervasive in the stories we tell, why do ads pretend it doesn’t exist? If life is pain, Highness, why is it so hard to sell?
First off, selling pain is a hard brief to crack. You have to identify how it benefits you and why you should want this thing in your life. Writing an ad for pain is like trying to appreciate the beauty of a firecracker going off in your hand. So, we take the easy way out and talk about how effective the erectile dysfunction medicine is, and we speed talk through the side effects like they don’t exist. Blank, disingenuous smiling in ads is so pervasive it’s hard to imagine what a campaign in favor of an early death might look like. Does it even make sense?
To answer that, you have to accept that marketing a product (or anything, really) isn’t just selling stuff to people. In its finest moments, marketing is a form of psychological legerdemain that can help people understand the world differently. It’s about solving problems. Marketing can be a salve for our greatest fears, but agencies and brands are so worried about doing the wrong thing and wasting money that they turn everything into a bland cartoon that mocks real life. But, marketing pain is actually a good idea. If we applied the creative strategies of a marketing campaign to help us navigate our most painful moments, we could positively impact the human experience. We could turn pain into an asset, a trend, a must-have accessory.
Cancer’s brand equity
Marketing starts with understanding the brand, and cancer already has a lot of history in people’s minds. It’s what we advertising people call “brand equity.” And it’s not the good kind. Cancer equals horribleness. Cancer equals death. Cancer is people with hollow eyes wearing hospital johnnies glumly rolling wheelie poles with banana bags around the place. No one would ever choose cancer at the grocery store. Bad things are “as serious as cancer,” and it’s a word that is whispered more than spoken.
After we understand the brand, we have to get to know the target. Easy. It’s me, Nathan. Fortysomething, into pop culture, my purchase behavior is research-driven, and I spend a lot of time online. I’m in chemo. I had a port installed in my chest through which a variety of poisons meant to battle the illness and destroy my body have been pumped. I have two kids and a wife and I own my home. I lease my car.
After we understand the brand and the target, we need to identify the benefits for our target consumer. Our target lives in a world where cultivating a personal brand is the norm. From a marketing perspective, cancer is great for building a personal brand. The movie of your life is playing out on LinkedIn, and having cancer is social media’s version of killing Bambi’s mom. Being a hero is an incredibly valuable identity, and identity is at the core of a personal brand. You can use filters and hashtag all day long, but what you actually ARE defines the value of your perspective and what you can think about in public.
Based on how I present, I need to be thoughtful about how I think out loud. I am a cisgender male, white, Jewish, a New Yorker, on the north side of average-looking with enough money to go on vacation. My identity is benign or poisonous depending who you ask. I can’t talk about anything. The Diagnosis changed everything. I’m no longer plainly in a position of power. For example, one drug I took as part of my chemotherapy changed the way I look to an extreme degree. Suddenly, I was covered in severe acne and I had no eyebrows. For the first time ever, I had to feel the curious eyeballs when I walked into a room/Zoom. And for the first time ever, I received empathy. But I also projected real strength. A strength I earned. I was enduring something. I had never been in a situation where I had to struggle. Cancer altered my identity. It feels gross to say it, but it’s cool to have cancer.
THE INSIGHT: IT’S COOL TO HAVE CANCER
And for those of you shuddering at the ruthlessness of this analysis: Remember, in advertising, it’s never a question of “do I like it,” it’s a question of “does it work.”
And yes, I believe it does.
To provide a basic understanding of the value of cancer for our target, we need a USP (unique selling proposition). What does cancer give you that nothing else can (other than tumors, obviously)? Based on my experience, cancer gives one a clear understanding about the nature of love. I assure you love is an abstraction until you find out you’re dying. Love becomes a commodity, a fruit to eat, water to drink. It also helps you understand the impact you have on others. People are compelled to tell you how and why they love you. It is a shocking, life-changing experience reserved for the Dying. It’s like forgetting you bought some crypto and opening your account to find a thousand bucks.
But, “Cancer makes you feel loved” is too salesy. The benefit doesn’t clearly outweigh the cost, and it doesn’t connect back to our insight, “It’s cool to have cancer.” Most importantly, I’m not sure it’s “ownable” by cancer. To find out what was truly unique to cancer, I had to ask, “Where does cancer exist in the market of deadly things?” It’s somewhere between the nebulous survivability of AIDS and the gruesome physicality of a car crash. I think we could argue that the nature of cancer’s deadliness is its key differentiator.
According to the CDC, it’s the country’s number-two killer after heart disease. So, it’s really good at it. Notably, with cancer, you don’t often drop dead. You find out death is coming. It is unique because it brings to life the key factor of human existence. You are dying; you know it, and there’s nothing you can do. That is an experience that cancer does better than anybody. A real USP. Now, that’s good advertising! We just need to find the right language to make the benefits of having cancer appealing and impactful.
Let’s take a look at the research again, i.e., my experience so far.
When I was first told I had cancer, I shrugged. Cancer? It had nothing to do with me. And yet, it had everything to do with me. I had, without knowing it, been living with cancer for the better part of a decade. I’d known it as long as my youngest child. In many ways, cancer came into my life as a child would, innocently, looking up at me with big glistening eyes, as if it had been sitting and patiently waiting for my attention as it grew. Cancer is basically an evil baby. As a parent, I’ve learned that as a kid grows, you learn at least as much as you teach. And even an unwanted child teaches you lessons. I have learned a lot from that little shit.
Here’s our unique selling proposition: “Cancer teaches you life’s most important lessons.”
That’s pretty good. It builds on our insight, it’s ownable, and based on a product truth. Cancer is as good at helping you learn about life as it is at killing you.
Now that we understand cancer’s position in the Marketplace of Dying, we have to understand its true “competitive set.” Previously, we would have thought its competition is other things that can kill you; but now we know, based on our USP, that cancer is really competing against other things that teach us life’s biggest lessons.
More research . . . There’s a massive trend right now in psychedelic therapies (the overall market is expected to grow to more than $7B by 2026), and searches for “shroom moms” have increased 3,200% this year alone. Well, I can assure you that being diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic cancer is a mind-expanding experience.
The steroids in my chemo cocktail often keep me up overnight thinking about life without myself. I imagined my wife being married to another man for 40 years. My 10-year-old lording the fact over her younger sister that she spent more time with me. I thought about my company disappearing. My wife’s struggle to keep the house. And I had to plan for these eventualities—design what they call “legacy content” to leave behind a piece of myself for the girls.
I carved out new mental spaces and created vocabulary for unthinkable ideas. I became ready to die. And being ready to die is a different relationship to living. The choices we make in our lives are an expression of how we relate to death. Are you ruthlessly ambitious (none of this means anything, so why not be an asshole) or are you relentlessly kind (I want people at my funeral to have sweet memories). I became entirely present. I was living inside my death, experiencing life and death simultaneously. I would feel nostalgic for things as I experienced them; life became the act of creating memories. I wasn’t doing things for fun, I was imprinting photos of myself in the minds of my family.
We think of babies as playful and creative because they see the world anew each day. Well, so do dying people. Cancer connects us to our values, to what’s important and ultimately can shift our perspective so we appreciate living. Without cancer, it’s easy to forget. Cancer doesn’t just kill you, it makes you live. It increases your life experience by reducing your life expectancy. That is trippy, but it’s also a powerful offering. Psychedelics offer us self-realization, a sense of connectedness and wisdom. So does cancer, that stupid hippie.
That’s starting to feel like advertising. Maybe dying from cancer is exactly the thing we need to connect to the fact that we are alive. Now, we can craft a positioning statement out of which all our communications will emerge.
POSITIONING STATEMENT: Cancer is the best tool to teach you what it means to be alive
We have positioned our brand, let’s move on to the vision and the mission.
A vision statement represents the way you want the world to be. A mission statement is how you’re going to do it. Cancer’s current vision is, “We are creating a world of dead people,” and the mission is “by killing everyone.” Jeez, cancer.
To discover the language, we need to articulate our mission; I often rely on a brand manifesto. A lot of copywriters hate them, but as someone who loves to write actual words, I’ve always enjoyed the poetic act of writing out what a brand stands for. In this case, our new cancer brand is about learning and personal growth. So, we need a manifesto that really maps out those values so everyone with a Diagnosis can print it out and hang it on the wall of their cubicle, or in this case, hospital room or toilet if you’re doing radiation (inside joke for my fellow patients out there).
Looking back on a long life
Is not necessarily a good thing.
With so many humans already gone
And so many yet to come,
A long life leads to complacency.
When you don’t know when something ends, it can be hard to know when to really start.
We, The Dying Young, got no time for looking forward or back.
We are alive in the Now,
Unburdened by the Then,
That dark dream that haunts the Long-Lived.
Our lives aren’t cut short or left unfinished.
They are designed this way.
To be smaller in scale.
A life lived in miniature is faster, more compact and intense.
Smaller and yet complete.
We learn old-person lessons at a young person’s age.
We feel more and pause less.
Reduced life expectancy equals increased life experience.
It’s better this way.
We took a higher dose, that’s all.
Of the real good shit, and it’s hitting us already.
We know what it means to die.
And you could not. Are not allowed to.
We know something you don’t.
What it means to live.
Don’t you want to know what this feels like?
Look.
No one likes a deadline,
But there’s a reason they call it that.
We, The Dying Young, just happen to know when our work is due.
Our Vision: To help people understand what it means to live.
Our Mission: By dying young.
The Dying Young. That’s interesting. This began as a campaign for one person, but maybe the audience is expanding. Maybe this isn’t just a campaign, maybe it’s a movement. Who is it for? Who we want to impact is pretty clear to me. We’re looking to impact the world at large, all mortals, anyone who is currently or intends to be living. But, to do that, we want to activate a small subset of that cohort, “The Dying Young.” And maybe what’s unique is that this is more than a demographic (a segment of the population defined by knowable data), it’s also a psychographic analysis (a segment defined by a common mental state).
I’ll take a swing and say, if you’re under fiftyish and you’re dying, you’re young. Now, there’s gonna be some fuzz on that line because some 55 year olds are children and some 45 year olds are 80. So, maybe it’s a self-designated thing; we can figure out the details. But, most importantly, if you’re facing the end while still in the beginning or middle, you have the power to write the story we need to tell about dying. That it is more than just pain.
Maybe dying young gives us the insight we need to heal the society we live in. Maybe instead of asking The Dying Young, “How do you feel?” we should be asking, “What have you learned?” We expect the Dying to retreat from living, but what if we looked at this as an opportunity to create? To share ideas? An experience that was less focused on leaving the world behind and more focused on what we leave behind? I often find myself asking, “Why do people feel bad for me if I’m the one who understands the true nature of love?”
Holy shit. It worked. As the target, I can say that marketing can shift the perspective of the Dying. But, can we shift the perspective of the rest of humanity?
We need a tagline. The story, written in its most condensed and powerful form. Taglines are the most fun and hardest part of the whole advertising exercise. We need a strong offering that’s true. Like how using Apple makes you look creative and drinking Bud Light makes you look like an asshole. What’s the one unforgettable sentence that describes what cancer gives you?
Get closer to the real you, with cancer. Nope.
Live more with cancer. Too pharma.
What would you do if you knew you were gonna die? Find out with cancer. Cool, but wordy.
We have to remember that cancer isn’t the disease, it’s the idea—and our campaign is about what we learn from it. It teaches old-person lessons to young people.
Wisdom. Guaranteed. That’s it.
The campaign writes itself.