Havas Chicago's Staged Funeral Prompts Questions About Mental Health Activations

On a busy street in Chicago’s River North district, tourists and passersby gaped at an open casket on display inside a building lobby. A hearse driver, who had parked on the curb outside, placed a sign on the sidewalk that read, “Funeral in progress.” The casket faced the street, easy for people to view through wall-to-ceiling windows.

Upon examination, there wasn’t anything inside the casket but cards—so many that they were almost spilling out. Curious passersby who walked into the lobby found that it smelled like lilies, reminiscent of funeral proceedings. Near the casket were more flowers, a guest book, rows of chairs with reserved seating and a wall-sized obituary.

“[The flowers] on the casket, we picked to reflect the color of suicide prevention, which is purple,” Wei-Ting Huang, a junior art director at Havas Chicago, told Adweek.

The scene, sobering for anyone who wandered by or went inside, was not a real funeral home, nor did it belong to a brand. Instead, it was an advertising agency’s lobby. Havas Chicago staged it all, working with junior creatives who volunteered to take on the jarring project.

“Our reason we get out of bed is to make a meaningful difference with the people and the brands we work with. A big part of that is our employees all have passion points and all want to make the world a better place,” Myra Nussbaum, president and chief creative officer of Havas Chicago, told Adweek of the activation.

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Despite the agency’s good intentions, the lobby elicited criticism from some industry leaders and mental health advocates who say suicide awareness campaigns should be handled differently. Such backlash is a reminder that well-intentioned brands (or advertising agencies) risk doing more damage than good if their activations wind up triggering their audience, and also that any brand tackling a topic like suicide prevention risks scrutiny.

Havas Chicago produced the activation under a tight timeline that unintentionally mirrored the short window often allowed for preparing real funeral arrangements. Pulling it together in just one week made launching during Suicide Prevention Week possible, but it also contributed to the Havas Chicago team developing the sensitive idea without a nonprofit’s involvement—one thing communications expert Elizabeth Rosenberg, in a conversation with Adweek about the activation, questioned the agency for foregoing.

Inside the ‘11 Minutes Funeral Home’

A TV placed on the wall above rows of empty chairs showed an 11-minute countdown.

Eleven minutes symbolizes the window between each death by suicide in the U.S., according to 2021 estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That year, there were 48,183 deaths by suicide in the U.S alone. Havas employees wanted the transformed lobby, named the “11 Minutes Funeral Home,” to represent the big emotional and financial decisions loved ones must make after losing someone to suicide.

The building doorman, Rudy Arce, who’s held that role for 28 years, dressed as a funeral home manager. As the first face that passersby saw inside the lobby, he fielded questions from people curious about the activation and the company behind it.

“First of all, you have many hotels here. You have basically, people as tourists … They’re looking at this, and it brings their attention too because [the countdown reaches zero] approximately every 11 minutes,” Arce said. “Then, you have also people going to work. The red line [subway] is just right here on the corner,” he added.

Why some industry leaders criticize the activation

A number of Havas employees submitted ideas for a Suicide Prevention Week lobby activation. In fact, the agency’s strategy team wrote the project brief in three days and were surprised that 40 agency employees showed up to the briefing eager to help. None of those 40 employees raised concerns about the work. Once it drew news coverage, however, some observers shared their concerns on social platforms. One was Rosenberg, whose LinkedIn post deemed the lobby potentially triggering and stunt-like. Her criticism raises questions: Was the Havas Chicago lobby activation sensitive enough? Did it make enough of an impact?

“While I think it’s great to start conversations about these things, we have got to push ourselves harder to make meaningful and impactful change. Our industry has gotten far too comfortable turning serious issues into stunts that drive headlines and award submissions, and literally do very little else. I hope this piece turns out to be different than so many stunts that have come before it,” Rosenberg said.

Responding to those questioning if the latest work is opportunistic, a Havas Chicago representative confirmed the agency does not plan to submit the lobby activation for awards. “We sincerely understand the concerns of those who find the campaign triggering. The heart of our message is the urgency of addressing mental health,” the representative told Adweek, adding, “Feedback is always a gift, and we will continue to strive for balance in all our efforts going forward.”

Allison Herman, the director of education at the Chicago-based suicide prevention nonprofit Hope for the Day, shared Rosenberg’s concern. “Before replicating a potentially triggering awareness activation like this, I would urge folks to read reportingonsuicide.org to follow these recommendations to safely report on and speak to suicide in a responsible manner,” Herman told Adweek. “Campaigns and discussions that focus on where people can find resources, messages of hope and recovery, and what folks can do if someone in their circle is struggling are much more appreciated,” Herman, who is also a former Havas Chicago employee, added.

Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide is the organization behind the website Herman mentioned. A collective of suicide prevention experts developed the online website in collaboration with public health organizations and journalism schools. It offers media employees guidance on how to write about suicide, but brands and other organizations eager to make a difference will find the guidance generally applicable to their work, too.

Although the “11 Minutes” activation does, actually, follow most of that guidance—it doesn’t heed one recommendation. The intentionally provocative activation did not feature the stories of help and hope that the website’s authors deem important for preventing suicide. This raises another question marketers should contend with: Must all activations addressing suicide prevention do so in an uplifting way?

Not every successful campaign does. Nussbaum and her team drew inspiration from CALM, a UK-based organization dedicated to suicide prevention that created the 2022 exhibition, “The Last Photo,” with adam&eveDDB. The exhibition displayed the last photos taken of people who died by suicide. They’re shown smiling and laughing in those images, conveying that mental health illnesses are often invisible to others and can go undetected by loved ones. Compare the largely positive responses to CALM’s campaign with the “11 Minutes” backlash, and it’s clear that brands willing to step up for mental health advocacy must contend with nuance and risk exposing themselves to backlash.

“Anything around mental health issues is very nuanced and is very individual, so it is quite hard to think of an execution that is going to make everybody happy,” Rosenberg said. She also praised Havas Chicago’s previous lobby activations, including a 2018 suicide prevention activation created in collaboration with Hope for the Day that raised money for suicide prevention efforts. Despite the nonprofit’s involvement, the 2018 activation was also unnerving. It involved staging 121 mannequins in the agency lobby, one for each life lost to suicide in the U.S. each day.

Created by employees personally affected by suicide

The activation was personally meaningful for agency employees who strove to get it right. It especially mattered to Will Russell, the strategist on the project who lost a friend to suicide exactly a year and one day before its launch.

“All the sudden, someone is gone. You have to make all these decisions that are so hard, and so horrible. We wanted to showcase that, to really put some contrast between the decision to have a conversation and the harder decisions you have to make after somebody’s gone,” Russell said.

Emilly Olivares and Ivana Gatica, the activation’s copywriters, considered the process people go through when crafting an obituary that honors deceased loved ones. After a traumatizing loss, people must consider what type of funeral presentation their loved one would have liked, Olivares told Adweek, before adding, “You know, it’s not as easy as you think.”

Jason Phillips, the project’s producer, found himself calling several local funeral homes to obtain the materials the team needed. “We needed to have a physical casket and a physical hearse here on the site for people to actually have that ‘wow’ moment,” Phillips told Adweek. Making the campaign especially conspicuous for passersby was a strategic move. Havas Chicago art director Mason Galecki hoped the presentation itself might encourage onlookers to check in on their loved ones more often.

Floral wallpaper inside the lobby appeared elegant and innocuous, until closer inspection, the text between flower illustrations listed suicide statistics. The copywriters dedicated the thousands of in-memoriam cards inside the casket to each person lost to suicide in the U.S. this year. On each card, the agency printed resources and conversation starters that lobby visitors could walk away with. Gatica spent time researching those resources and learning how to respectfully host a funeral. She considered which flowers to use and how to properly arrange a casket.

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Employees placed a trigger warning in plain view and communicated in advance to peers that the lobby activation might be emotionally taxing. There was no expectation that Havas employees view or participate in the activation. But, because suicide prevention activations are relatively rare, there’s not a playbook for how to protect employees. “Everybody handles suicide and, I think, grief differently,” Rosenberg said, acknowledging the challenge.

When Adweek asked the project’s creative leads whether they worried about the lobby conveying the wrong message, some spoke up about their personal experiences with suicide and said those experiences helped inform their creative decisions. The creatives empathized with their intended audience: people suffering from or supporting others with mental health concerns, who want to talk about mental health issues, but aren’t sure how.

“It’s a difficult topic. It was difficult to be working on a project like this, but it’s also meaningful. It’s important to facilitate this conversation so that others feel like they have the space to talk about it,” said Gatica.