Who are you?
Issue 11 | July 2009
Agency
Proximity London
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Caitlin Ryan
Date
From September 2009
Background
The Royal National Lifeboats Institution is a charity that saves lives at sea. The problem is, most of Britain’s young people live in cities nowhere near the coast. The challenge was to get them to think positively about the organisation even if they’d never been on a boat in their lives.
Idea
The agency identified twelve influential YouTube vloggers online and then went to great lengths to track down their home-street addresses. From their blogs they found out the theatre group one belonged to and tracked him down that way; they even bought a belt on eBay from one young guy just to get his return address.
They were mailed unbranded packages in which they found newspaper cuttings about how selfish, ignorant and violent their generation was said to be by their elders and they were invited to ‘rewrite the headlines’.
They were asked to open the packages on camera and comment on what they found inside.
They each generated massive response from young people speaking up online about how they see themselves as the very opposite of self-centred, bullying and shallow.
Over a million links later, the RNLI revealed themselves to the vloggers, inviting them and their cameras to their HQ to meet a crew of young lifeboat men and women. They trained in the wave pool and even went on a rescue patrol. Then, by the agency’s own admission, these young vloggers made a series of films infinitely more powerful than anything the agency could have done.
Results
Dozens of ‘most viewed’ videos in over 10 countries.
Hundreds of thousands of young people both informed about the RNLI and inspired.
500 volunteers aged between 16 and 22 who are willing to risk their lives at sea to save the lives of others.
Our Thoughts
This is one of the three most inspiring campaigns in Directory 11, in the way that it embraces social issues and gets people involved in a brand through sharing its values. For years the pundits have been saying that advertising is no longer about messaging but about inspiring conversations and now here it is, the perfect example of that new model – a brand not interacting with its customers so much as facilitating their interaction with each other.