6 x The Art of Impact Marketing & Multi-Media Campaigning

Marketing: is it a sneaky game with a psychological rule book? Us telling people over a beer that online marketing is “what we do with our lives” nowadays, sometimes causes raised eyebrows and suspicious looks. “Really, marketing? Doesn’t that suck all the creativity out of the media? Like cold-blooded advertising, which fuels consumerism and capitalism, making the rich go richer, and the poor spending their hard earned pennies on things they don’t actually need?” Well, true in some cases: perhaps when you spin some superficial ads for pointless Amazon-products or polluting multinationals. But marketing has so much more up its sleeve. Marketing can tell stories. Marketing can shape society. Marketing can unite or inspire. That’s why today, we want to talk about the art of creative, multimedia impact marketing.

What if you want to put some behavioral change in a specific group of people in motion for the greater good? Say, for example, you want certain neighbourhoods in Berlin to start separating their waste. Or you want to change unhealthy perspectives on beauty standards in a specific industry.

Perhaps you want teenagers in the Netherlands to get off their phones while cycling, or you’d like East-African based NGOs to scale up their anti-racism narrative.

This is where psychology meets creative content creation and strategic thinking. After all, policy making as a solo act does not always do the trick. To spark behavioural change, a perspective needs changing. The way people perceive, value, feel or respond to certain topics. An impact that stimulates the senses. What do people see, hear, smell, or feel?

A successful impact campaign takes into account the psychology of the target group. Who are they? What is their background? How can you speak their language? Do you reach them through a movie, a book, a game, a TikTok challenge, a ringtone or a video clip?

In this article we want to take a closer look at 6 creative and artistic impact campaigns: crossing country borders, realms of perception and different types of media. Ready? Let’s roll!

Let’s get hip, yo! Governments (often occupied by fairly old people – let’s be honest) don’t always get the hang of how to speak to the kids these days. Many of the young and naive deem themselves invincible and love to start some fires – or fireworks, especially around New Years. In 2018, the Dutch government had one goal: getting these young folks to wear highly uncool safety glasses. After a few failed campaigns, they decided to reach out for the help of record label TopNotch and rapper Donnie – who usually raps about drug use and fast driving.

The campaign? A hot record, with an even hotter video clip: Knalplanga. (Slang for firework glasses, we’re guessing something similar to Bang Blinkers on the Block…?) Other Dutch celebrities posed as extras in the video clip, and shared it on their social media as well. Good use of creative influencer marketing, innit?

What do you do when you live in a country where women earn 18.5% less than men? Where government representatives state that women are smaller, weaker and less intelligent than men? Where there’s a lack of sexual education and the general view of women in the content of sex, is shaped by a porn magazine that reduces women to sex objects?

Right. You buy the magazine and turn it into something else. In 2018, the most iconic and longest running porn magazine Twój Weekend was for sale. For 27 years, the porn magazine published misogynistic and sexist content and consistently flew off the shelves and into homes nation-wide. Wavemaker took its chance and bought the magazine, only to release one last issue: The Last Ever Issue – on international women’s day! While they kept the original sections, they reimagined and changed the content, portraying the diversity of womanhood and exploring the subject of gender equality. They sent hundreds of copies to journalists and influencers, to widen their online reach. And then what? Wavemaker shut the magazine down: making The Last Ever Issue not only the last, but also the bestselling Twój Magazine issue in 10 years.

The 13-smallest country in the world, the Republic of Palau, has everything to form a perfect tropical tourist paradise. Pristine beaches, beautiful coral reefs, thick forests and loads of wildlife. But tourism can be a blessing in disguise when it starts to pose a threat to the country’s fragile natural ecosystems. How can you educate travelers on littering and damaging behaviour, while also putting your country on the map of potential visitors?

The Palau Legacy Project had a very small budget to create a campaign that could do both. So they set up the Palau Pledge, constructed by children of Palau. Every tourist now gets a stamp in their passport with the pledge they need to sign. The campaign won three Cannes Lion Grand Prix awards, was promoted by big names like Leonardo Dicaprio and Keith Richards, and set an example for other countries to follow. The campaign did not only succeed in environmental preservation, but also in gaining worldwide attention as a beautiful (clean!) travel destination.

“Go back to Africa”, a sentence that we’ve all heard or read: and usually not in a friendly context. In this racist slur, ‘Africa’ is used in the pejorative, as a poor “country” where one would not want to be wandering around: as opposed to for example the Great America. “Shithole countries” as Trump used to point out during his presidency. But what if the narrative of ‘Go back to Africa’ is turned around? If we read it as: ‘Go back to one of these 54 beautiful and diverse nations, to their bustling cities, wondrous nature and colorful cultures. Go back to your roots!’

Black & Abroad, a tour company with a focus on black travel, does many different things with this data-driven, Pan-African tourism campaign. They combat racism by erasing a racist message and replacing it with a positive vision on all Africa’s 54 countries. They also promote these countries as tourist destinations by using hyper-targeted, visual ads. Next to this, they impact the predominantly white world of travel influencing: by creating a socially sourced content platform where black travelers are represented in inspirational travel content. “Turning the white trolls into black gold.” The result? A Cannes Lion Award and 315% brand visibility increase!

I think pretty much every woman can agree with us when we say: periods are no fun. Next to mood swings, uncontrollable munchies, bloated bellies and cramps, we have to deal with the monthly mess in our panties. Yet in Germany, sanitary products were considered “luxury goods”, and were therefore subject to the same 19% tax as a Rolex or Maserati. The goods that were considered daily necessities and thus escaped with a mere 7% tax? Caviar, oil paintings, truffles and… books.

If you want to apply political pressure and actually change the law, it’s important to send a bold political message and make it go viral. The Female Company and VLMY&R did so by outsmarting this patriarchal law in a remarkable and creative way: by selling tampons inside a book, reducing the tax price to 7%. To enhance the message, the book was filled with period-related stories and illustrations: raising awareness around gender inequality and busting menstruation taboos. But the book also referred to a petition at change.org, asking people to sign for the abolishment of the tampon tax.

The first-run copy of the book sold out in one day. Several female politicians spoke up about the tampon tax, and when the petition gathered over 175.000 signatures, the political debate was impossible to avoid. A year later, Germany reduced the tampon tax from 19% to 7%.

The importance of donating blood was apparently not a popular topic among young, Dutch males. Sanquin, a Dutch blood bank, observed that 75% of blood donors was female and mostly aged 45 and above. So more young, male blood was needed. How to reach this target group? By approaching them in a language that speaks to them, on fictional battle fields.

In League of Legends, a popular game among Dutch guys, First Blood is an important moment in the game where the player kills his first opponent in a new playing field. The campaign used this opportunity to let the player know that ‘First Blood can save lives.’ During a Dutch live stream of the League’s finals, not only the pop-up appeared on the screen, but the viewers were also tempted to immediately register through the game. The campaign did not go unnoticed by several big game-related media websites, widening the reach of the campaign even further in the gaming realm.