Standing out in a crowd

Joss Davidge, Business Director of brand experience agency BEcause, continues his weekly search for innovative marketing ideas. This week he showcases an interesting charity campaign that used a high-impact experience in order to stand out from the crowd.
 
It would be fair to say that sometimes we are so bombarded by marketing messages that we can't see the wood for the trees. We have become accustomed to haphazard marketing tactics and spaces crammed with colourful, flirtatious brand messages. We have even learnt to adeptly turn a blind-eye to much of it.
 
Marketing campaigns that aren't being seen or heard can be buried, adapted or repackaged and treated as a learning curve. But what if the campaign is really important? What if it involves finding a missing child? Cutting through the marketing mix to talk about issues that matter to us at a root level can be incredibly challenging. This is why I have chosen to showcase this poignant and effective campaign this week. It drives home a message and makes people realise that they need to open their eyes as some messages we absent-mindedly ignore really do matter.
 
A representative from Missing Children, an Argentinean charity, handed out leaflets displaying three missing children at a football game. Lots of people took the flyer and this video shows them glancing at it and then folding it up without a second thought. A video from Missing Children was then shown on the big screen just before kick-off. It featured the person who was handing out the leaflets and revealed that he was actually one of the missing children pictured on the pamphlet. The video then implored people to keep their eyes open in future and to take the search for missing children seriously. The crowd was clearly stunned.  
 
This campaign is a great example of the power of reinforcing a key message through an experience. I think that it is very likely that those who had been there not only spread the campaign through word of mouth, but also started to take Missing Children's important call-to-action seriously.

Read more from Joss Davidge in our Clubhouse.