Production Notes

My, how time flies.

The reason Live With It earns a place in this showcase is twofold: the merits of the project itself, and who I became as a result of making it. So I want to take some time to document the production and to memorialize my tenure at Ignite Health, which I still consider one of the highest points of my career.

Let me tell you a Story

It was the early 2000s. The world had survived Y2K, and the internet was coming alive in ways it hadn't been before. Higher bandwidth meant images and video were reaching millions of screens for the first time. Investment dollars chased every corner of the emerging digital frontier. The result was the long-predicted convergence of traditional and digital media — and it was genuinely new. Nobody had a complete map.

Ignite Health, the agency that birthed this project, was a medical marketing agency — not an animation studio. That distinction mattered more than it might seem. Live With It was the passion project of one of Ignite's founders, Fabio Gratton. His experiment brought together the business logic of the pharmaceutical world, the gravity of patients navigating a terminal disease, and the approachability of cartoons. Not just any cartoons. Serious cartoons. Health cartoons. The vision was ambitious and electrifying, and I was lucky enough to be in the room when it was taking shape.

The Minefield

One of the persistent challenges of healthcare advertising — then and now — is how heavily regulated it is, and rightly so. Claims by drug manufacturers have to be credible and verifiable under FDA guidelines. Benefits and risks must be disclosed with equal visibility. The result is a familiar awkwardness: ads that are enormously enthusiastic about improving your life while saying almost nothing about what the product actually does. Enormous hedges. Endless qualifiers. Results may vary.

To put the scale of this world in context: between 2000 and 2020, spending on direct-to-consumer ads, health services, and professional pharma promotions nearly doubled — from roughly $17.7 billion to over $30 billion annually. It was a serious industry operating under serious constraints.

Now add HIV. A disease carrying stigma unlike almost any other, arriving in a marketing environment already wired for caution. Not only were the legal and regulatory guardrails tighter than usual — the human stakes were higher too. The people this work needed to reach were navigating something incurable, often in silence, often alone.

The Creative Directors, Account Managers, and Principals at Ignite understood the playing field. They also understood that being a maverick — toeing the line between bold and reckless — does not end well in medical marketing. So the answer to how you humanize the patient, address stigma directly, and still nod toward a once-daily HIV treatment became something quieter and stranger and more ambitious: a story about five fictional HIV patients learning how to live with an incurable disease.

A FIve Part Series

Live With It ran for five episodes, each centered on a character whose relationship to the disease — and to each other — unfolded slowly across the arc of the series.

Episode 1 — "Mudd"

Mudd is an anxious, solitary man living with HIV who takes his first step toward coming to grips with his situation by attending a support group.

Episode 2 — "Trevor"

Trevor is the man who runs the support group — steady, present, a quiet anchor for everyone around him.

Episode 3 — "Bobbie"

Bobbie is a former runway model whose lifestyle choices led to addiction and, eventually, to contracting HIV.

Episode 4 — "Julio"

Julio is a car enthusiast who introduces Mudd to the founder of the support group — a man known only as the Invisible Man, so called because even though he never attends the meetings, a chair is always set out for him.

Episode 5 — "The Invisible Man"

The Invisible Man contracted HIV after a blood transfusion following an accident. It is eventually revealed that he founded the support group, and was the mentor who brought Trevor, Bobbie, and Julio back from the brink — guiding them toward treatment and toward living. Though on treatment himself, he is too ill to attend the meetings. The chair remains empty. The group remains.