Time to Change: Be in Your Mate's Corner

Ogilvy & Mather London disrupt the cliché of swaggering men in adverts to help combat depression in their first spot for mental health charity Time to Change.

Be in Your Mate’s Corner, which is the first ad of a five year partnership between the agency and charity, has been directed by Ben Whitehouse, and produced by Agile Films.

In it, we watch three men strutting through a town while soul music plays, holding props associated with a boxing match. One holds a stool, one a bucket, and two have white towels slung over their shoulders. However, as the ad progresses, they turn out to be less Raging Bull, and more Empathetic Bull, which probably doesn’t look so good on a poster. It is revealed they have come to speak to their depressed friend John, to literally be 'in his corner' as the title suggests.

This powerful ad, then, turns machismo on its head, showing that the real manly thing to do is to be there for a struggling friend. As O&M’s CCO Mick Mahoney (which itself sounds like a boxer’s name…) puts it, ‘if blokes could see their mates were in trouble, they’d step in. So we’ve got a clear role to play in helping blokes to spot the symptoms and take action’.