Panadol Campaign Spotlights Silly Little Pains

Pain relief advertising is always the same, overly exaggerated, and almost unreal: people holding their back or their head, wincing, with a red dot marking the spot where they feel pain. But the truth is that we also find pain in many little stupid ways: bumping into sharp corners, stepping on stuff, or stubbing our toes. 

Panadol is the leading pain relief brand in the Middle East, and they know communication in this crowded category was tending to the generic. Having previously focused on what the moment of release from pain feels like for different people, they understood that calling out the moment of pain could mobilise us too.

Mariano Favetto and Joaquín Ares, ECDs at Grey shared, “We wanted to transmit the reality of pain, not the artificial advertising caricature. To do this we found those moments we have all been through, and where we have probably let out a rather inappropriate curse word.”

With a series of print ads and social videos, this Panadol campaign created by Grey Argentina and Grey Dubai shows seemingly harmless domestic settings but then you realise this idyllic image is capturing the place and time that pain has occurred, with Panadol conveniently calling out that almost hidden source of suffering we are all too familiar with.