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Hello Creative Souls,
Most great products eventually create a weird marketing problem:
If they work too well, they disappear. |
That’s Dramamine’s curse. For 75 years, it’s been the motion sickness pill. It does its job, people feel fine, and then… they forget it exists. No one brags about “that time they didn’t puke on a boat.” There’s nothing to talk about. |
So for its 75th anniversary, Dramamine had a brutal brief: |
How do you celebrate a pill people only remember when they’re miserable…
in a category no one finds remotely sexy? |
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Their answer:
Don’t glorify the pill. Immortalise what it killed. |
They built an entire campaign around the barf bag. |
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The set-up: Celebrate what you made obsolete |
 | Dramamine - The Last Barf Bag (case study) |
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Instead of doing a heritage ad full of labs, doctors and timelines, Dramamine zoomed in on one odd little cousin born the same year: the airplane sick bag, first introduced in 1949. |
The insight:
If Dramamine is the hero of motion sickness, the barf bag is its ghost. |
FCB Chicago turned that ghost into a cultural object: |
A 14-minute documentary – “The Last Barf Bag: A Tribute to a Cultural Icon” featuring historians, collectors and flight attendants, treating barf bags like rare vinyl or first editions. A one-day NYC exhibition – walls lined with decades of airline bags: different airlines, eras, graphic design styles, layout quirks. A capsule collection – “This Is Not a Barf Bag” – repurposed bags as puppets, tiny chef hats, vases… even a custom barf-bag puffer jacket designed by artist Jessie Maxwell Bearden. Shoppable nostalgia – bags sold for $5 (or $10 with a Dramamine sample), turning the exhibit from “look and leave” into “take a piece of the story home.” newsletter_dramamine_barf_bag
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The pill barely appears. The barf bag is the star. |
Which, of course, is the entire point. |
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Why this works (and why Cannes went feral for it) |
On paper, this is a campaign about… nausea relief.
On screen and in-person, it’s about: |
Travel history – how flying used to feel. Design history – forgotten airline branding and illustration. Shared humanity – everyone, at some point, has fought their stomach in a moving vehicle.
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Three big things are going on under the hood: |
Make the invisible visible
When a product works, there is no story: no drama, no incident, no memory.
By centering the object that used to be necessary, Dramamine makes the “before” era painfully clear. You don’t need a chart to prove efficacy; a wall of barf bags does that for you. Use an artifact as your brand anchor
Instead of “75 years of Dramamine,” the campaign is really “75 years of the barf bag.”
That shift does two things: It gives journalists and viewers something concrete and weird to latch onto. It places Dramamine as curator, not narrator. The brand becomes the one preserving, contextualising and re-framing the object the category forgot.
Turn gross into precious
The joke isn’t “ew, puke.”
The joke is: “Look how far we’ve come that this disgusting little thing is now a museum piece.”
That’s status. That’s distance. And by extension, that’s proof the pill quietly won.
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No surprise it picked up the Health & Wellness Grand Prix at Cannes and a small mountain of other awards – juries love when a “boring” category is treated with this level of imagination and craft. |
newsletter_dramamine_barf_bag |
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The pattern: How to steal this for your brand |
The Dramamine play is not “find a quirky prop.”
It’s: |
Honor what your product made obsolete. |
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Here’s the rough pattern you can port to your own world: |
Find the extinct sidekick What object, ritual or workaround did your product quietly kill? The paper map. The fax cover sheet. The “Closed for Inventory” sign. The “Do not rewind” sticker on VHS tapes.
Treat it like culture, not clutter Don’t mock it. Curate it. Exhibitions, archives, mini-docs, “last of its kind” drops, collaborations with artists or collectors.
Let the contrast do the selling You don’t need hard claims if the comparison is baked into the concept. “Look at everything we had to do before this existed” is a more powerful argument than “50% faster, 30% cheaper.”
Give people a way to touch the story
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The real lesson: Stop talking about yourself |
Dramamine could have done what most heritage brands do: |
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Nobody would have cared. |
Instead, they asked: |
“What’s the weirdest, most specific thing orbiting our category that only exists because we once didn’t work?” |
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And then they put that in a gallery. |
The result:
People now discover Dramamine through barf bags, not packaging.
Journalists write about travel culture and design history – and Dramamine rides along as the quiet, long-time hero. |
If you’re sitting on a “boring” product in a “boring” category, this is your cheat code: |
Don’t glorify the feature.
Go archeological on the fallout.
Find the obsolete object left behind, and give it the send-off it deserves. |
Sometimes the fastest way to make your brand feel alive…
is to throw a funeral for what it killed. |
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Figment is written by Abbhinav Kastura, a writer/producer who has spent a decade making impactful internet videos and Guru Nicketan, an advertising nerd, B2B Marketer, stand-up comedian, and a film buff. |
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