Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

“Engage young people where they are hanging out – and that’s online.” That was the mandate from Vancouver’s Wasserman + Partners when they engaged Engine Digital for this year’s WorkSafe BC’s Raise Your Hand campaign. For the three years that we have worked with this brand, the strategy has been to educate young people about the importance of work place safety and the rights that safeguard them. In order to get people excited and involved with the Raise Your Hand message, we had to swap the negative undertones of a safety campaign into a movement backboned on positivity.

Wasserman wanted to capture the imagination of BC’s youth with an anthemic (made up word) call-to-arms and Obama-esque motivational imagery. We liked this direction and challenged, why simply inspire when we can harness inspiration and infuse a do-it-yourself flavour that would truly engage young people online. The output from our initial creative meetings with Wasserman was a 60’s grassroots inspired love-in theme that would leverage the peaceful protest imagery from that era. With a central (most importantly) portable idea, the challenge from that point forward was successfully marrying the creative executions into one seamless experience.

While Wasserman set to the real world problems of crafting an anthem that would stir people into action, the team at Engine Digital got down to the very serious business of making buttons. Of all the imagery of the 60’s, the one thing that we chose to focus our attention on was the iconic image of a Vietnam-era soldier with a peace button pinned to his chest. We liked the idea of a small gesture that would let people demonstrate to the world an individual’s support for something that was larger than themselves. Our challenge internally was how to take a real world item like a button and make it live and breath online without being repetitive. Our solution was the development of a simple Flash-based application that would let users create a personalized button design and a digital campaign that would then let people share their creations with the world.

Making a button isn’t as easy as it sounds. Weeks of planning, research and development were poured into the development of the Raise Your Hand Button Generator. The essence of the site is a graphic-based application where users can design their own button from the ground up using a library of graphics or even personalize the button by including a picture of themselves in the final layout. Once a user completes their button, they are then able to upload their creation to the now iconic Hand. The idea behind the Hand was to visually demonstrate to users that they were together as one. This mantra became paramount to the 2009 campaign, and escaped the confines of the web, allowing young people to form a tangible statement to wear on their chests in the form of a pinback button.

Take-away: Marketing to today’s youth is no longer as straightforward as employing traditional street events or marketing stunts. In order to connect with young people you have to utilize a combination of approaches that integrate completely from the street to the desk-level executions of microsites and social media applications.

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