The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2022
Lifeblood runs a live NGV test of which emotion makes Australians donate blood
Leo Burnett mounted five emotion-driven pieces at NGV and let visitors' QR votes tell Lifeblood which feeling converts Australians into donors.
Lifeblood
What it had to solve
Blood donation service Lifeblood faced a stubborn stat — only 3% of Australians donate — and no evidence of which emotional appeal actually converts people. The National Gallery of Victoria became the stage for testing the question live.
How it works
Only 3% of Australians donate blood, and no one could say which emotion — joy, anger, sadness, fear or disgust — is most effective at changing that. Leo Burnett's answer was to stop guessing and run the question as a live experiment.
Within the National Gallery of Victoria, the agency created five pieces of communication across five different media channels, each focused on eliciting one human emotion. Visitors voted by QR code on which piece moved them most, so their reactions arrived as data, not opinions.
That data went to blood donation service Lifeblood, arming it with evidence on how best to convert Australians into donors. The D&AD awards archive preserves the experiment as 'What Makes You Bleed' — a campaign built to produce knowledge as much as attention.
Why it lands
- Testing five emotions side by side turns a guess about persuasion into data a charity can defend.
- Putting each emotion in its own media channel gives every hypothesis a fair, distinct execution.
- QR voting captures what moved people at the moment of contact, not weeks later in a survey.
- Lifeblood walks away with a working playbook for future donor communications, not a one-off ad.
- A national gallery gives a grim subject cultural gravity and a built-in audience to test on.
What it did
The D&AD awards archive carries the experiment and records no donation figures. What it documents is a new evidence base: instead of arguing about which feeling sells blood donation, Lifeblood let an audience's live responses name the emotion most likely to convert them.
What you can take
When persuasion is uncertain, make the audience the instrument: give each emotional hypothesis its own execution and let response data pick the winner.
Since then
The D&AD awards archive preserves 'What Makes You Bleed' as the record of the NGV experiment. The page reports no donor figures, so the documented outcome is the method itself: Lifeblood received a live read on which emotions move Australians, and the format — five executions, one emotion each, audience votes as data — became repeatable for later communications.
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