Paras Pharma split migraine sufferers' faces on posters to sell its painkiller

Paras Pharma's STOPACHE needed to break through in a crowded painkiller market, but migraine is an invisible problem: passersby cannot see a sufferer's pain, and conventional pharma advertising tends to show smiling, headache-free people that communicate nothing about the condition.

Y&R Dubai's 'Splitting Headache' campaign made the pain visible. Split posters featuring portraits of people in great pain were placed outside clinics and pharmacies in Dubai — the exact places where someone would be looking for relief. Each face was cracked apart as if the migraine itself were tearing it, and the three-dimensional cut forced viewers to step through the artwork, momentarily feeling the split.

The ambient installation used the environment as the message: the poster could not be ignored on the way into the pharmacy, and its scale turned an intimate symptom into a public spectacle. More than 7,000 visitors saw the executions at their locations.

The work won the Design Grand Prix at Dubai Lynx 2011, made Cannes Lions history for Y&R Dubai with a Silver Lion in Design the same year, and earned recognition at The One Show — proof that a simple, product-true visual can carry an entire pharmaceutical campaign.

Show the pain the way patients feel it — split open

The split-face visual translated an invisible internal pain into something anyone could feel

Placing the work at clinics and pharmacies put it in front of people actively seeking relief

The three-dimensional cut made viewers physically part of the artwork

Zero copy was needed — the image itself sold the product's benefit

When a product's benefit is invisible (relief from an internal pain), show the problem the way the sufferer experiences it instead of showing the product or the healthy result.

The campaign took the Design Grand Prix at Dubai Lynx 2011 and a Silver Lion in Design at Cannes 2011, part of a strong year that made Y&R Dubai a named contender on the global circuit. In advertising archives it remains a reference example of using ambient outdoor media to dramatize an invisible symptom rather than showing the product's happy outcome.