We made people want

to call Hospice.

The weight of one word.

Hospice. Say it out loud and watch someone flinch.

Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo is Erie County’s only certified hospice—a distinction that should set them apart. It does, technically. But when your entire category carries a stigma so deep that families wait until the final hours to call, certification isn’t enough. The misconceptions are stacked: hospice means giving up. It means a facility, not your home. It means the end, not a better version of what’s left.

HPCB knew the truth was the opposite. Patients who call earlier live longer. Families who engage hospice sooner get months of support they’d otherwise navigate alone. Thirteen months of bereavement care follow, a fact that rarely makes it into the conversation because everyone’s still stuck on whether calling at all means they’ve lost hope.

They came to us not to tweak a campaign, but to fundamentally change the emotional math around a phone call that most people make too late—or not at all.

hospice 

hospice 

Client/Industry

HospiceNonprofits

Tactics

Brand StrategyCreativeDigital AdvertisingIntegrated CampaignOut-of-HomeVideo

Start with listening. Then listen differently.

Before a single headline, we built a strategic brief that went deep on audience, stigma, and cultural context. Not a surface-level demographic scan. A real accounting of what stands between HPCB and the people who need them.

The caregiver audience—mostly women, middle-aged, suburban, terrified of doing the wrong thing—needed relief and reassurance. The patient audience, largely in their 70s through 90s, carried a different weight: the fear that accepting help would burden their families or signal defeat. They wanted to know their people would be cared for after they were gone. That message had never been the center of an HPCB campaign.

And then there was the East Side.

Buffalo’s East Side community faces a fundamentally different set of barriers. A shortage of primary care doctors drives healthcare into emergency rooms, which creates a crisis-centric relationship with medicine. Faith carries more weight than a physician’s recommendation—and suggesting hospice can feel like suggesting someone abandon faith in healing. Family dynamics are complex: during home visits, one person might advocate for hospice while a room full of others pushes back. The misconception that hospice hastens death through medication persists. Trust has to be built from scratch, visit by visit.

We couldn’t build one campaign and aim it at everyone. We needed a platform flexible enough to speak to a suburban daughter Googling symptom management at midnight and a pastor navigating the space between prayer and medicine.

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Take on the day.

The campaign line landed when we stopped thinking about hospice and started thinking about Tuesday morning.

What does a patient need on a Tuesday? Not a brochure about holistic care. Strength. Hope. Courage. Faith. The ability to take on the day—this day—with support that makes it possible to focus on living instead of dying.

“Take on the Day” reframes the entire decision. Calling HPCB isn’t giving up. It’s making a proactive choice. It’s approaching serious illness with focus and resilience. The headline structure pairs a single powerful word—Strength, Hope, Courage, Faith, Freedom, Peace of Mind, Confidence, Assurance—with the campaign line. Each pairing maps to a real patient or caregiver story. Each one earns its place because it reflects what HPCB’s team actually sees happening when families engage early enough.

The empowerment angle was intentional and unexpected for the category. Hospice advertising tends to lean soft—held hands, gentle sunlight, whispered comfort. HPCB had specifically asked us to move past that. The visuals needed to show people living, not fading. The tone needed to be compassionate without being fragile.

 

Real faces. Real stories. Heroic portraits.

Every person in this campaign is real. Teja, a daughter and caregiver. Art, a hospice patient in a nursing home. Jean, a hospice patient at home. Paula, June, Ed—each photographed against a rich teal backdrop in portraits that are deliberately heroic. Not clinical. Not pitying. Strong.

The photography direction was a strategic decision. These images needed to work on a billboard at highway speed and in a bus shelter where someone might stand for ten minutes reading every word. The subjects had to look like people you know—because they are. And they had to project the very qualities the headlines name: strength, courage, hope.

All portraits were shot with clipping paths for maximum creative flexibility across formats. The same image of Jean works as a tight face crop in a 300×250 digital ad and as a full portrait dominating a print spread. One shoot. Dozens of executions.

One platform, every channel, two communities.

The campaign deployed across billboards, bus shelters, print advertising, digital display (static and animated), and four television spots. Each execution followed the same visual system: heroic portrait, campaign headline, supporting copy, HPCB branding with the origami dove, and “Talk with us” call to action. But the system was designed to flex.

General market executions featured both hospice and palliative care messaging, speaking broadly to families navigating serious illness. Suburban placements led with Strength, Courage, Freedom—words that map to the caregiver’s need for relief and the patient’s desire for agency.

East Side executions were different by design. Bus shelters in East Side neighborhoods featured only hospice messaging—because palliative care awareness wasn’t the barrier there. The barrier was trust, misconception, and a healthcare system that had trained the community to think reactively. These placements prioritized subjects of color, longer body copy for the dwell time a bus shelter allows, QR codes for direct engagement, and headlines anchored in Hope and Faith—language that resonates with a community where spirituality and medicine are inseparable.

The bus shelter format allowed something billboards can’t: enough copy to explain what hospice actually provides. In-home compassionate care. Quality of life improvement. Emotional support for the whole family. And the credential that cuts through noise in a market full of imitators—the only certified hospice program in Erie County.

Design that does cultural work.

The visual identity goes beyond the portrait-and-headline formula. We built a system of graphic elements—mosaic patterns with geometric shapes, organic edges, and vibrant accent colors drawn from Latino and African artistic traditions—that bring cultural relevance into the campaign without making it feel like a PSA.

A color bar above each headline shifts hue to match the accent palette: gold, teal, pink, green, coral. The origami dove—HPCB’s brand mark—anchors every execution. For video, we created a signature animation where the “Talk with us” speech bubble transforms into the dove, a brand moment that’s subtle and memorable.

The typography system pairs three typefaces with clear roles: Suez One for the emotional keyword in each headline, DIN 2014 for structure and body copy, and Baskerville Italic for supporting phrases. The combination reads warm and authoritative—which is exactly what you need when you’re asking someone to make the most difficult phone call of their life.

We codified all of it—photography direction, color system, typography rules, graphic elements, logo usage, animation specs—in a comprehensive campaign guide that HPCB’s communications team can execute from independently.

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Four spots, two lengths, one truth.

The television component delivered four 30-second spots with 15-second cutdowns, each featuring different combinations of patients and caregivers. The spots follow the same emotional architecture: open on a portrait, pair it with the campaign headline, reveal the person’s story through text overlays, close with “Talk with us” and the origami animation.

The spots were built to rotate across flight schedules and audience targeting without losing cohesion. Whether a viewer sees Teja’s story about caregiving or Art’s story about courage in a nursing home, the campaign line ties them together. The 15-second versions tighten the same narrative into a format that works in pre-roll and connected TV.

Hospice isn’t a place at all. You don’t have to be an inpatient on HPCB’s campus to receive treatment. Hospice is wherever you are.

Karen Pusateri

Manager of Marketing and Communication,
Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo

“

The deliverable that keeps delivering.

What we handed HPCB wasn’t a set of ads. It was a campaign system.

The 22-page campaign guide documents everything: brand position, promise, and tone. Campaign objectives tied to specific audiences. Key messaging mapped to creative executions. Theme line and headline structure with room to grow—new words, new stories, same framework. Logo usage rules for every context. Typography specs. Color palette with primary, gradient, and accent applications. Graphic element construction. Photography direction and subject library. Sample creative across every format.

This is the work that lets a client’s internal team extend a campaign for years without losing quality or coherence. New patient story? New headline word? New ad format? The guide answers every question before it’s asked.

Let’s Connect 

Let’s Connect 

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Integrated campaigns aren’t about being everywhere. They’re about saying the right thing to the right person in the right moment—and saying it consistently across every channel, every format, and every community you serve. We build the strategy, the creative, and the systems that make it sustainable.

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