cr(e)a(ti)ve ideas™

— PROJECT NAME

The Call

— PROJECT TYPE

Multi-channel Awareness Campaign for Bias in Healthcare

— ROLE

Copy Supervisor

— CLIENT

EMPOWHER NY

— DATE

February 2020

The Problem

Racial bias in healthcare isn’t a hidden flaw in the system—it’s a fatal one.

Black Americans are 34% less likely to be prescribed proper pain relief. Black women die in childbirth at up to four times the rate of white women. These aren’t “disparities.” They’re preventable tragedies.

But in 2020, statistics alone were failing to move the needle. We needed to make bias impossible to deny and impossible to ignore.

The Strategy

Expose prejudice in its rawest, most irrefutable form: by letting people hear it happen.

Our approach stripped away every variable except one—perceived race. Thirty identical calls to healthcare providers. Same script. Same questions. Same medical scenarios. The only difference? The voice on the line.

The Idea

We called it “The Call”—a live experiment that captured the real-time impact of unconscious bias on patient care.

Each call was recorded, revealing the chilling differences in treatment and advice when the caller “sounded Black” versus when they “sounded white.”

The Execution

The recordings were broadcast across radio, woven into Instagram Stories, and pushed to media outlets worldwide.

We avoided dramatization or heavy production—authenticity was our most powerful creative tool. The stripped-back format gave the audience nowhere to look, and nothing to hide behind.

The Impact

• • 7 million people reached in just one day
• 
  
• • 415% increase in conversations about racial bias in healthcare
• 
  
• • Coverage in Forbes, Daily Mail, Metro, and more
• 
  
• • Over 1,000 unconscious bias trainings completed