This year, strategy honours a Campaign of the Year for the first time. The case had the highest combined score for any single Agency of the Year campaign entry and countless comments from the judges who recognized Cundari’s SickKids Pain Squad mobile app as a clear favourite.

The agency came up with a solution for helping children who are battling cancer at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and who needed to fill out reports about the pain they experienced. Young patients were given an iPhone loaded with the app, which alerted them when it was time to fill out their report.

Using a gestural interface, kids could complete their “pain reporting mission” with the flick of a finger and identify exactly where and how much it hurt. To ensure that patients would file their reports as consistently as possible, Cundari incorporated an engaging reward structure built around police ranks and badges. To help keep the “recruits” engaged as they progressed, it enlisted the casts of Canadian police dramas Flashpoint and Rookie Blue and filmed a series of motivational videos that were imbedded into the app experience.

The app won two Gold Lions at Cannes this year and recently picked up Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Award for Interactive. It’s being used in four other Canadian hospitals and plans are in motion to make it available globally.