When a simple gesture becomes the heart of everything
Signing off on the creative concept and the entire phygital planning for the new 5xmille campaign of the Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli IRCCS was one of the most stimulating challenges of the first half of 2026. Telling the story of the scientific research conducted by an international centre of excellence demands something more than a good idea: it demands an idea in which people can see themselves.
Flipping the perception
The starting point was immediately clear: the 5xmille is often perceived as a mere bureaucratic formality. From the very first brainstorming session, we began thinking about the best way to flip this perception and show the real value of this simple yet extraordinarily powerful gesture.
We started from the classic concept of care, exploring more “traditional” directions, ones more closely tied to the hospital world. As we followed that path, however, we quickly realised that care came across as somehow distant, invisible, incomprehensible.
The question we then asked ourselves, the one that ultimately sparked the campaign’s insight, was: what if we closed that distance? What if the pen of an ordinary citizen were just as important and powerful as a surgeon’s scalpel?
The mirror: two worlds in a single gesture
That’s where, after much reflection (and many rounds of Midjourney-generated images), the visual and specular parallel took shape.
“The brief said: ‘the signature activates research’. But how do you translate that into an image? We tried dozens of approaches: hands touching, hands overlapping, hands clasping. Nothing worked. Then we understood, they didn’t need to touch. They needed to mirror each other. Two different gestures, two different worlds, the same intensity. The signature and the incision. The donor looking at the doctor, and vice versa. Not a meeting, a recognition.”
Alessandro Notarpietro, art director
The AI tools used in the campaign
The pursuit of authenticity always guided our intentions: no catalogue models, no actors. The faces and hands you see in the campaign belong to real doctors, surgeons, and researchers at the Policlinico Gemelli. But to arrive at the millimetre-perfect precision of those 10 vertical subjects, from neurodegenerative conditions to pancreatic cancer, we clearly integrated Artificial Intelligence into our co-creation process.
Midjourney for pre-visualisation: before the lights went on at the Rome shoot, we used generative AI to test the perfect symmetry of the framing, the chromatic weights, and the shadows of the mirrored hands.
ElevenLabs for the social video voiceover: navigating the platform’s various models and voices, we found the right one, calibrating its tone and mood to best convey the campaign message.
After generating the images with Midjourney, Higgsfield allowed us to render the fluidity of the dynamic split-screen, producing a video that could seamlessly integrate with the creative ecosystem we had built.
And ever-present Gemini, which, as is now the case in all of our daily lives, was always right there, helping us at every stage of the project.
Knowing when to subtract
“When the initial insight is this sharp, the writing process becomes almost an exercise in subtraction. We tested several narrative approaches, but we realised that the best solution was also the most immediate: the copy simply had to amplify the visual power of the split-screen, echoing the graphic gesture without adding background noise or unnecessary superstructure.”
Valentina Bergo, copywriter
A synergy always in evidence
The result of this process is a massive phygital ecosystem that moves across static and dynamic OOH placements throughout Rome, enters the wards of the Gemelli with dedicated floor graphics and window decals, and expands into the digital space across Meta, LinkedIn, and Spotify.
Working on this campaign reminded us of a fundamental truth about our work at Keyformat: technological innovation and generative AI tools are extraordinary amplifiers, but the initial spark and the strength of a project remain, as always, an entirely human matter. A direct and specular connection between the awareness of those who sign and the dedication of those who care.
