With the end of Week 2 over we have made leaps and bounds from where we were. NZ Blood confirmed that 18-25 year olds is a preferable target demographic as they have found that people who donated when they are young tend to be more inclined to donate again when they are older and therefore recruiting youth donors is a good investment for them with a long term return. However, in recent years there has been a decline of donation rates in youth and only 18% of youth donors are still donating 4 years after their first donation. This influences our project as even though we initially only wanted to attract new donors, it could be rendered useless if people don't continue to donate. Therefore, we have slightly shifted our angle so that it focuses on both new and returning donors.

After looking at the initial campaigns we looked at again (Swim Reaper and Department of Lost nights) we realised that the subversion in these campaigns works really well because both the issues they are bringing attention to are common and quite present in people's lives. Blood donation on the other hand is not. For me it is as I donate plasma once every 3 weeks, but when it comes to donating whole blood (your standard blood donation), a person can only donate once every 3 months, so it's not always present in people's lives even if they do it. So from this we realise we will not be able to be as subversive as we initially intended but as we want to make the campaign very experiential and possible also interactive there is still a level of subversion we can have.

One of the other campaigns we looked at that really stood out to us was the #goballsout campaign run by Testicular Cancer New Zealand. The campaign was a social media centred campaign which encouraged men to go out and map their run on free exercise apps like Strava and then post an image of their mapped run on social media, however the run had to draw the shape of a cock and balls. The message they were getting across was that exercise can help prevent testicular cancer and so they actually got the men out there, exercising. They appealed to the target demographic well too as naturally guys tend to be immature and if they had the chance to draw dicks for a good cause, then absolutely they would. The way the campaign was run was interesting too as they ran print posters out in public and initiated some social media posts but then it snowballed and the content ended up being user generated. The benefit of this is that the users that had their posts reposted were more engaged in the campaign and so it is more effective.

This model is definitely something that I feel we should follow, as the engagement comes from being involved in the campaign and in the digital age we live in now it is paramount to engage your audience to have their attention, otherwise they will simply swipe you away and continue on with their life. We are looking at really grabbing their attention by playing on the slightly taboo humour that young people have that is partly funny because it's not 100% socially acceptable to talk about, for example we thought of making euphemisms about donating blood like "I was so nervous my first time." We are also looking at absurdist humour that is present in millennials and more in the form of excuses. People have lots of excuses as to why they don't donate blood (see https://www.notion.so/studiov/Yes-I-m-Judging-Your-Stupid-Excuse-For-Not-Donating-Blood-82520018bf054eb78171f3051eddc4e9) but then the excuse, "I was donating blood" is very accepted because you cannot be shunned for doing it as it is a very selfless thing to do. Taking this we are thinking we could do something like giving people this ultimate excuse for when their flatmate tells them to do the dishes or something but then they actually have to donate as they used the excuse. Even if they don't they it will at least be in their mind.

We have also taken this week to expand on our case studies and academic research into experiential marketing and I found a great paper that is quite old actually (from 1999) that really sums experiential marketing up quite well:

*"Traditional marketing views consumers as rational decision-makers who care about functional features and benefits. In contrast, experiential marketers view consumers as rational and emotional human beings who are concerned with achieving pleasurable experiences." (*Schmitt, 1999)

And it also has come to our attention that a lot of the marketing campaigns that haven't done so well in recent years are campaigns that play on the audience's empathy, which is normally non profit organisations like Worldvision. At this stage we have become numb to this and when a Worldvision ad comes on TV a lot of people change the channel rather than face the situation. That's why I feel it would be interesting and probably quite effective if we play on people's selfish nature and try and entice them to make it benefit them rather than someone else, hence why the excuse idea might be quite effective

**Schmitt, B. (1999). Experiential marketing. Journal of marketing management, 15(1-3), 53-67.