12.07.08
Outside of Changethethought and trying to be a decent husband to a very supportive wife, I also work full time as an Art Director for an advertising agency in Denver called Cactus.
We have been working over 2 years on what I would now call a ‘health awareness’ campaign called Own Your C. The campaign was originally aimed at teen smokers, but we wanted to keep the message broad and empowering versus fear-mongering, polarizing and condescending. We thought if we could make it cool and rebellious to be intelligent and responsible versus being dumb and reckless, we might be able to make a difference in helping young people make healthy choices. We are still knee deep in it, and so far it has been an amazing ride.
This year we wanted to turn a corner and start trying to utilize the campaign to get young people both in Colorado and out of Colorado to start engaging one another and talking about the things that are important to them. We are still in the throes of rolling out that idea and the hub of the campaign is the newly launched ownyourC website. We saw the internet taking a pretty hard shift since the campaign started. The internet is finally emerging as a communication tool that has real power to be something young people can use to communicate and proliferate their own culture right under the nose of babyboom generation. So as opposed to fighting it we decided to go there with them and start steering the campaign in that same direction.
We worked with Lifelongfriendshipsociety to help create some quick 15 second spots that would speak to younger viewers about what they could do at the new website and ‘announce’ that the campaign had evolved. We felt it was also important to do something dramatic to attract new people to the campaign. We decided to transform the old ‘destination’ website into a ‘platform’ where users could create their own space on the site and defend their ideas by sharing their choices with their peers. Agencynet was responsible for building the website and they really poured themselves all the way into the project, as did LFS, and we were so happy to get the chance to work with them both. Amazing talent was represented throughout in terms of the creative.
Like I said the campaign is under constant development and as it evolves we are learning more and more about our audience, their ideas and needs. So far it has been a very rewarding experience and I have been really excited to be a part of it.
