Category : Print Advertisement
Single or Series for a paid media print insertion. Examples include Daily or Weekly magazine and newspaper ads.
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Because of this, the Saskatchewan Construction Association (SCA) was seeking to increase awareness of the construction industry as a first-choice-career amongst potential learners and those looking for career options.
In a province that is growing unlike any other time in our history and is facing a significant labour shortage, it was imperative that the industry takes the lead in raising awareness of construction as a career.
The Smarten Up campaign was created to address this need and to compliment the work done by Trade Up Saskatchewan; a group of partners focused on growing the number of workers in the skilled trades profession. There was an opportunity to develop a strong voice amongst partners to recruit and attract employees, future tradespeople, and business owners to the construction industry. This campaign was intended to raise awareness of opportunities in the industry and showcase construction as a career choice in the ever growing province.
The campaign needed to promote those advantages by highlighting the choices facing a young person contemplating a university education. For example, the choice of “Grad Day to Pay Day” highlights the speed in which training can be achieved, the availability of job opportunities, and the ability to earn an income in a relatively short time. The messages and creative reflect the call to action to make a smart choice in deciding your education.
1. The Challenge:
The biggest was that it wasn’t a question of changing someones perspective towards something external, like advocacy, political messaging, or convincing them product A is better than product B. It's a case of a person being motivated internally to re-evaluate lifelong behaviors and attitudes, with no immediate and obvious gratification, product or tax receipt to show for it.
2. The Strategy:
Germs are gross, and they can make you really sick, so why not literally ‘illustrate’ what germs can do to you… using REAL germs.
And rather than utilize stock lab cultures, let's drive home the immediacy of the problem by using bacteria sampled from around the viewers own local environment, and highlight this fact in the campaign.
3. The Process:
The key to the power of this campaign in my mind was to avoid creating or manipulating the germ images using photoshop, it had to be the real deal.
The problem is that unlike predictable media like pencil or paint, working with something that could grow in any color, any shape, in any direction, and on it's own timetable, was challenging to say the least.
After several weeks and what seemed like hundreds of dishes, I developed a technique using clear vinyl stickers that clearly showed the 'grossness' of the germs, while allowing a clean rendering of the characters
4. The Results:
The reaction both from the Health Region and in the public has been amazing and the campaign so far is doing exactly as the client hoped it would with widespread acceptance in hundreds of facilities.
"It is awesome that our long time goal of getting hand washing on the public radar has finally come to fruition, thanks to your expertise…"
"… posters are making a big splash in the community." “So proud of the end result.”
"I noticed those in the Endo unit last week...I washed my hands so much… they became dried out and chapped!"
