Public-service advertising rarely gets to be physically inconvenient for the people it is aimed at. Fertility Action’s new campaign, created by Publicis London, manages both: it makes an invisible inequality visible on digital out-of-home screens, and then it carries the evidence to the door of the institution responsible.
The pregnancy test as a storytelling device
The campaign is called “With You Through Testing Times,” and its central object is the pregnancy test. Instead of showing a positive or a negative result, the animated DOOH executions place a thought inside the test window. One frame reads “That was our last chance.” Another reads “Positive… For now.” A third reads “Maybe I’m not meant to be a mum.”
The thoughts fade in and out, one replacing another inside the same familiar frame. That is the right use of a moving medium: not decoration, but sequence. A static poster can hold one line; an animated screen can hold the fact that a fertility journey contains many moments rather than one result, and that most of them are not shareable in public.
The number behind the emotion
The campaign does not stay in the personal register. A dedicated execution states that only 25 percent of IVF cycles in England were NHS-funded in 2024, according to Little Black Book’s reporting on the work. That single figure converts a set of private stories into a public policy argument about who can afford treatment and where they happen to live.
The “postcode lottery” framing is the point. Fertility funding in England is commissioned through integrated care boards, and access varies by geography. A patient’s chances of NHS-funded treatment depend substantially on the commissioning decisions of the area they live in, which is precisely the kind of administrative inequality that never appears in ordinary advertising because it has no natural visual form.
Thirty crates outside Parliament
Fertility Action gave the inequality a physical scale. The organisation delivered 30 crates of negative pregnancy tests to Parliament, each crate labelled with the name of an integrated care board reported as offering eligible people only one NHS-funded IVF cycle. The crates were stacked on the pavement opposite the Palace of Westminster, in view of Big Ben, with a giant missed-delivery card standing among them.
The card reads “Sorry you keep missing the issue.” Beneath it, the campaign line runs: “Thousands of negatives, calling for one positive change.” The missed-delivery format is instantly legible to anyone who has ever found one on their doormat, and it does something clever with that familiarity: it reframes government inaction as a failure of delivery rather than a failure of intent, which is harder to dismiss.
Location as argument
Placing the activation outside Parliament is not a neutral media buy. The message is not addressed to government in the abstract; it is delivered to government at its own address, in crates, with a form attached. The campaign also invited people with lived experience to contribute their own pregnancy tests, which were collected and later carried toward Downing Street, turning the audience from spectator into participant.
A QR code on the creative routes people to Fertility Action’s petition. That closes the loop: the emotional work happens on the screens, the physical work happens on the pavement, and the response is captured in a form that can be counted.
What the campaign is asking for
The policy demand is specific rather than general. Fertility Action is calling for NHS-funded fertility treatment to follow NICE guidance, so that eligible people have fairer access regardless of where they live. That is a useful discipline for advocacy OOH: name the standard that already exists, and show the gap between the standard and the postcode.
Why it matters
This is one of the clearer demonstrations of how DOOH can move from awareness to advocacy without losing either. The screens carry the part that only screens can carry, which is private thought becoming public; the crates carry the part that only physical objects can carry, which is scale you can count. Most cause campaigns choose one register and stop. Fertility Action ran both, in the same week, on the same message. For any organisation trying to turn a complicated funding rule into something a commuter understands in four seconds, the structure here is worth studying closely.
Source: Atlas OOH – Fertility Action Uses DOOH to Expose England’s IVF Postcode Lottery
