During college, I interned at a small civil liberties NGO. They were at a crossroads when I started there. It was the summer of 2008, which was a couple years after outrage about the civil liberties abuses during the Bush years (largely continued into the Obama years, I'll add, to keep things non-political) boiled over. The idea of virality was a relatively new thing then and lots of different companies and organizations were trying to understand how to create and harness it. The organization, chiefly led by the founder, thought that they could create a viral moment for civil liberties by taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times on the fourth of July and recording videos of people saying they were going to reclaim their rights, or something along those lines. Predictably, it failed to have any real effect, which meant a couple months of time wasted and around $60,000 on the ad. The organization not only failed to understand the factors that shape virality, but was so sheltered in their own civil liberties bubble that they didn't understand that the world had moved on.
I mention this in part because the ad strikes me a bit as sheltered. My wife just came home for lunch and when I showed it to her, her first reaction was that it might hurt as much as help, because of the images chosen and the way it attempts to appeal for patients. We don't have a particularly photogenic disease, so it is difficult to convey on film what patients feel. Those pictures could quite easily be ridiculed, particularly the first and last. I hope that doesn't come off as unkind; the people willing to share themselves for this ad are heroic and clearly suffer terribly, but the rest of the world might not see in it what we see. To be effective, I think, a different approach is needed, one that approaches the problem from a different angle than how advocacy organizations for other diseases might.
@JaimeS, I think your suggestion of the tag on exercise is fantastic. That is the sort of direct and adversarial approach that I think could make more headway. It's aggressive, while being playful, and elides to the deep and serious issues that we ultimately want people to understand. Part of why I gave the story above is to highlight that I think this community needs both to understand more deeply where they are to understand how to engage and to be more creative about thinking through how to do so. The exercise tag is perfect in that regard.
P.S. I wasn't clear from the description from Solve. This ad will play when the ball drops? If so, that further heightens my concern for getting it right.