social media round up
An Award-Winning Masterclass
We recently attended PRWeek’s Great Campaigns of 2016 event and enjoyed hearing from a selection of this year’s PRWeek Awards winners. With campaign case studies from the likes of the British Heart Foundation, English Heritage, Marks and Spencer and Durex it was always going to be an interesting morning. The session kicked off with one of our favourites, the British Heart Foundation’s Heart Attack Experience – an engaging video-based campaign. This clever activity involved taking a booth to busy shopping centres and offering the general public the chance to experience what a heart attack feels like, and filming it. Teaser videos were shared showing a tense build up to the volunteers entering the booth and viewers had to visit the charity’s dedicated webpage to watch what happened next. This is where the twist comes in. It is set up to make you believe that the volunteers entering the booth are about to feel the physical sensation of themselves having a heart attack but instead, as they sit in the dark booth a telephone rings. On the other end of the line is someone telling them the story of when they lost a family member to a heart attack. A fantastic way to deliver the objective of raising awareness of the impact of those left behind by heart attacks. Such a moving and memorable campaign. Bravo British Heart Foundation. Another of our recent campaign highlights was for NHS Blood and Transplant. This is one that so many of us will have spotted, as the As, Os and Bs disappeared from well-known brands’ logos to highlight the dwindling supplies of donated blood. The background to this campaign is a story of persistence. When initially approaching big-name brands to get involved, the responses were a series of declines. With many layers of approval needed, doing this the ‘proper’ way wasn’t going to work. The agency called in favours and with some high profile contacts coming through (the Downing Street signage and the Daily Mirror masthead) plus a mention in Campaign magazine, other brands started to see the activity and it triggered a series of others wanting to get involved. The reach went far and wide with big hitters such as Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft and McDonalds (to name a few) getting involved and the results (judged on the number of new blood donors signing up) were clear to see. A true masterclass in PR creativity, innovation and determination demonstrated across a series of brilliant award-winning case studies. Certainly inspirational food for thought.THE HEART ATTACK EXPERIENCE_
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