As this my final year, I want to start doing things that are more in the realm of what I would like to do when I leave university. Which in short is no more installations for the sake of installations or to "raise awareness about", I want to actually do things that mean something. So for this first semester I have teamed up with Josh and Liam with the intention of doing a marketing campaign for NZ Blood. The idea came about as Josh receives blood product from NZ Blood in order to keep him alive and he wanted to give back to the blood service. He approached me as I am a regular plasma donor and Liam liked the idea when we pitched it to him and he is not a donor so we can have three different perspectives on the work as we go.
Now we don't want to make this a regular "We want you to donate blood" campaign because in this day in age I don't think that really works anymore. The idea is to make a subversive marketing campaign which at a glance one would not not instantly go "Oh thats for NZ blood to get people to donate." We want the message to be connotative rather than literal but still relatively easy to grasp.
Here are some examples we have been looking at. Notice that especially in the case of the Swim Reaper, it never actually mentions the cause but still gets the message across.
I am the Swim Reaper - Water Saftey NZ
Department of Lost Nights - Alcohol NZ
https://www.alcohol.org.nz/say-yeah-nah/department-of-lost-nights
Shell Lego Oil Spill - Greenpeace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhbliUq0_r4
This is the style we want to go for, and because the idea is that it's not overtly linked to NZ Blood we would have to come up with all the branding and appearance which the boys had to do for their Pilgrim project last semester and we are all quite interested in doing, so its more than building a particular campaign but more a whole brand. These are all digital campaign being run on social media and we don't want to close ourselves in too early as we have talked about possibly making it transmedia, but considering it is the first week we aren't settling on anything.
We reached out to NZ Blood this week and they are really keen to work with us and have even provided us with some information about why people do and don't donate and just some general statistics they have. At this stage the only thing we have locked in really is that we want to target the 18-25 year old demographic as this is one of the areas where donors are lacking and that is our demographic too. The next step is to research into various marketing campaigns that are different to the typical "on the nose" approach and even with some interactivity to them (because everyone loves a bit of that) and then start to work out our angle. We also know our goal is to (and I hate how much this sounds like "raise awareness" but) catalyse discussion around blood donation in NZ. A big marker of success we have as well is that if by the end of the semester Liam is donating, we have done something right.