The Challenge:
Persuading teenagers and young adults that reservoirs are dangerous could easily fall by the wayside along with the many of the commercial messages they’re exposed to on a daily basis. We knew that an awareness campaign deterring our audiences from swimming in reservoirs needed to cut through in a distinctive and memorable way. We not only needed to look to our young audience’s native channels – at a time when it was becoming increasingly more difficult to reach them, but also identify the creative platform that would make youngsters take notice.
The Approach:
Social analysis and quantitative research informed us that our teenage and young adult audiences were not aware of why reservoirs are dangerous, and we knew that peer pressure encouraged a herd mentality. The campaign strategy focused on delivering shock messages at a time and place when they might be considering cooling off in a reservoir. Executed by “cold water shock kills” video, hard-hitting pastiche of a 1960’s horror film, alongside eye-catching accompanying assets.
The campaign was activated across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Spotify.
Outcome:
- Over 2m total campaign impressions
- 14,000 clicks to the Reservoir Safety landing page
- An average campaign CPC of £0.29
- Facebook CPM 56% cheaper than the average (according to Hubspot)
- Nearly 80,000 impressions via Spotify
- After split-testing our Snapchat activity and format optimisation, we saw an uplift in swipe ups by 984%, and a reduced cost-per-swipe by 7p.