Who Killed Deon?

Background

The aim of the campaign was to convince teenagers in London who are involved on the periphery of youth violence (incidents involving stabbings and shootings) not to get involved, by engaging them in the complicated law known as Joint Enterprise, which means that if you are connected to a crime, even if not directly involved in committing it, you can still be charged for it.

Idea

To educate kids about this complex issue of Joint Enterprise, an interactive murder mystery was created for Facebook, about the murder of a boy called Deon. The story

Was about Rochelle, who started a nasty rumour abut Deon flirting with someone else’s girlfriend.

In the story, the ‘link manager’ sets up the meet (at a party), the ‘honey trap’ lures the boyfriend there, the ‘weapon storer’ tries to provide a gun, when that fails he hands over a knife, the ‘transporter’ takes the knife to the party, and an ‘elder’ tries to calm down the situation, before it escalates out of control and Deon gets stabbed.

Six short films were made, each telling the story from the point of view of one of the characters. At the end of each you got to find out if they were the killer, or not. In the end, what you discovered was that they were all his killers. And would all be charged for murder under Joint Enterprise.

The unbranded trailer for the campaign set up the characters, Deon’s murder, and challenged the audience to guess “Who killed Deon?’. This was launched on MTV and on key radio stations. The campaign itself ran on Facebook, while posters appeared on estates and in local youth centres and on the streets. The campaign also included viral seeding and display advertising using standard and rich banners on sites used by teenagers.

Results

The campaign delivered over 6 times the average level of engagement for a Facebook campaign - with the Action Rate for the ‘’Who Killed Deon page achieving 1% compared to the Facebook benchmark of 0.15%.

It delivered over 4.5 times the number of unique visitors estimated for the campaign with 135,371 unique visitors, compared to the 30,000 estimated by Mediacom.

It delivered 3 times the number of Facebook fans estimated for the campaign with 37,836 users who ‘liked’ the page, or a 28% fanning rate, nearly 3 times the Mediacom benchmark.

It attracted the right teenage audience, with over 89% of fans being 13-17 years old.

Each viewer watched an average of 3.5 videos before guessing ‘Who killed Deon’ correctly so were delivered the Joint Enterprise message 3 times. Over 60% of the videos viewed on MTV and Spotify were viewed in full.

The campaign generated a total of 3,857 comments, with the Facebook page alone accruing 821 wall posts, and 783 comments from fans.

Tracking revealed 59% of respondents took out that the message was ‘You can be charged with murder even if you did not actually kill someone’. Importantly, ‘Don’t get involved with weapons/ guns/ knives’ was taken out by 44% of teenagers.

The campaign generated free PR coverage on the BBC News, Capital FM and XFM, as well as gaining press coverage in the Evening Standard, BBC Newsbeat, Daily Mirror and local press (including Enfield Independent, Hackney Gazette and Willesden and Brent Times).

Our Thoughts

A year ago, Abbott Mead Vickers was the UK’s biggest trad. ad. agency with a reputation for great TV campaigns (think Guinness, BBC, Walker’s Crisps etc). Now it’s one of the hottest digital agencies in Europe. How the agency managed to change its systems and its culture without a bloodbath of its people and without the histrionics of rebranding themselves is a testimonial to an amazing management team.

They were Direct Agency of the Year at Cannes in 2010 and with this, Aviva on pages xx - xx and with new interactive work for Walker’s also receiving good reviews, they will be one of the top three in 2011 as well, without doubt.

There will always be a role for the TV commercial. But if you want to draw an audience in and get them to take part in your idea, sharing it among themselves, then this is how to do it.