The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2021–2022
AstraZeneca's Big Sneeze posters spray passersby to end parents' flu-shot indecision
For the 2021 flu season, 21Grams London built Manchester posters that literally sneezed water vapour on passersby to get the vaccination ask in their faces.
AstraZeneca
How it works
When the 2021 flu season came around, parents had already been bombarded with Covid-19 vaccination messages and were stuck in indecision. To reach these hard-to-reach parents, AstraZeneca ran a pilot campaign in Manchester built around an encounter no passing ad could copy: a poster that actually sneezes on people.
21Grams London engineered interactive digital posters with a bespoke spraying mechanism and built-in speakers. As people walked past, the poster let out a convincing sneeze and sprayed harmless water vapour, putting the vaccination message literally right in their faces — a physical interruption at the exact moment the ask is usually ignored.
A film documenting the street experience was then shared online, so the stunt kept working as content after each poster moment ended. The pilot was credited with a 12.7 percent increase in vaccination uptake in Manchester, and the poster execution was filed in the D&AD awards archive.
Why it lands
- Interrupting the delivery beats repeating the copy: vaccine-weary parents tuned out the message, so the campaign changed the medium instead of the wording.
- A public sneeze performs the very behaviour the campaign warns about, making the health ask physical, funny and impossible to ignore.
- The stunt was engineered to be filmed and shared, so one street idea produced both the live encounter and the online film that amplified it.
- Running the pilot in a single city gave the campaign a clear before-and-after population against which the uptake change could be measured.
What you can take
When an audience is saturated with a message, do not say it louder: make the message act, so the object performing the risk lands where copy is tuned out.
Since then
The Big Sneeze ran in Manchester for the 2021–22 flu season and its documenting film carried the stunt to a wider audience online. The campaign later won Gold at the 2022 Advertising Creative Circle Awards for the cinema film built on the same sneezing idea, and the poster execution remains in the D&AD awards archive as a press-and-outdoor case.
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