Case Studies. The business of winning hearts and minds
The event began with David Stevenson of The Rocket Science Group from London, U.K, sharing his insight into various campaigns he or his European peers have worked on to promote social awareness on a variety of topics, focusing especially on teen-drinking and pregnancy (see video below). He advocated an integrated approach, where the message is determined partly by the receiver, where focus-groups are essential to crafting the campaign, where listening is as important as broadcasting and where the broadcasting occurs over strategically selected channels. In the context of this event, Stevenson took on the role of pragmatist, describing in detail the value of research, delivery channels and stressing the importance of PR, not to promote the message exclusively, but to pose questions, talking points, to the target audience.
We were then witness to a highlight reel of recent Ontario government success-stories, including Bensimon-Byrne’s RecycleMe campaign promoting organ donation, GJP’s Foodland Ontario campaign focusing on locally-grown produce, and Partners and Edell’s Mumps awareness campaign, spearheaded by recent inductee into Marketing Hall of Legends, Marlene Hore. Hore, like Stevenson, approached the problem of Mumps awareness from the bottom up, with an endeavor to understand just what it is that college students (the target demographic for this campaign) were concerned about. The campaign resulted in 30,000 vaccinations.