Paul Borge
Posted on: January 6, 2010
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Audio:
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Slides: MTV – Say Yes to Safe Sex
Transcript:
All right. Here we go. Basically, I’m talking about MTV campaign we did for the Staying Alive Foundation, who you may have seen in the news recently. They do MTVs, HIV/AIDS, and awareness charity, they do AIDS prevention work all around the world. I’d briefed with them in April this year, I think, it was, was to raise awareness of safe sex, get young people advocating and talking and thinking about safe sex amongst themselves, and to drive sales of a lip balm produced and sell by the Body Shop, which raises money for…I keep looking at the screen for some reason…raises money for campaigns in Africa.
Basically, we had a challenge here, and the young people, 16-24 year olds, they’re not the traditional media consumers like the older generations are. They very much use social media, they’re very much used to switching off to traditional media, switching off to message-driven marketing. Actually, when it comes to safe sex, they’ve heard it all before. They hear it from the public sector, they hear it from their doctor, they hear it at school, at university. It’s not the most interesting message in the world, everybody knows they should do it. It’s one of those things that actually and it comes relevant at the point of consumption when you actually need to put a condom on.
So, to get through this, we looked apart the shifts. I’d be honest, we didn’t have a lot of money, this is a charitable thing we did. So, we had to look at doing things that would create collateral, create their own content without us having to spend a lot of money on things. So, I was going to talk about three partnerships we did. One was with Spotify, we got together with the world’s biggest online music service. One was with a website called Someone Once Told Me, which some of you may know as a photographic site that sort of prints and uses evocative photography to deliver a message. One was with a site called Hecklerspray, which is one of the UK’s biggest blogs, bit like sort of FHM, slightly off-the-wall voice kind of blog.
With Spotify, we happily and luckily tapped into a really strong vibe on the Internet. You know, remember a few months ago, everybody was talking about Spotify, everybody was sharing playlist. It was the new kid on the block, people were collaborating on things together. We realized that, actually, yes, people love Spotify, people love sex, people love sex and music together. So, we got together with a bunch of MTV presenters, we got top bloggers like Paris Hilton, we got [xx] and we pooled them all together and got them to create a place like playlist. So, 10-track playlist, you can listen to when you’re having sex. We released those through MTV’s social media channels. We got bloggers to talk about them on their blogs. We released them on to Twitter and got people to actually share their own with us. Very quickly, we created a lot of buzz around this playlist, just the whole concept of them. On the back of that, we drove the safe sex message.
In terms of how that went, I think we delivered something like 500,000 people to the MTV campaign. I mean, we connected through various channels whether it’s Twitter or blogs or traditional online media. [xx] cents with about half a million people in the UK. In terms of driving traffic to the website, I think we sent about a quarter a million people through that.
Moving on, and I wish I could show you. [xx]. Skip to the end. Here we go. See what I’m talking about now?
Man: Your [xx] is 26 megabytes.
Speaker: Oh, is it? [xx]. Right. The skiff. Here we go. Someone once told me. Yes, I think, probably on this site already. Mario is very well known on the UK social media, a very popular guy, very popular site. He told me once that he’d love to get more celebrities on the site. I remember that when we were putting this campaign together. We went back to MTV and we said, “Look, we can tap into this network, we can give something of value to Mario, and actually, to his users.” So, we had a chat, we saw what we could do, like there is Travis McCoy from Gym Class Heroes. He’s actually just recorded a single for this charity that’s going out this week. It was the first time celebrity content had ever been seen on Someone Once Told Me, which gave Mario something to shout about and gave his users and sort of followers something to be excited about.
We also involved – I’m pointing in the wrong direction – people like Laura Whitmore from MTV. We involved people like Abby Lee, the sex blogger, from Girl With a One Track Mind. Of course, people liked that, took part in what we were doing, and then went and told other people about it on their own blogs and their own Twitter feeds. There’s an important things to remember is if you can get people fired up and excited about something and get them going off and shouting to their users, their followers, whoever those happen to be, they’re going to do that advocacy job for you.
Another example there, BitchBus.com doing the same thing. Of course, like I said, Mario shared it through his Facebook page, Twitter feeds, Facebook application, all the rest of it. Spotify we talked about, and again, the principle was the same. It was about getting people involved, people who have resonance with the target audience, who have their own massive followings on the Web, and getting them to go out there and talk about the stuff for us. Popjustice, brilliant example of how a brand took our campaign on, gave it its own flavor. Popjustice, if anyone follows them, [xx] x-factor, very irreverent, very off-the-wall, very silly, and you can tell, looking at their playlist, things like “I’ll Do You Like A Truck,” part of that sort of song list there.
Final partnership I’ll talk about today was Hecklerspray. I’m a big fan of blogger relations, but I absolutely hate it when people start sending press materials and press releases and regurgitated surveys to bloggers. I don’t like it, I’m not interested. Same goes for a one-size fits all approach to blog relations. I got another friend, he’s a blogger who absolutely can’t stand it when he gets approached to run a competition because there’s nothing in it for him really. He knows that all of his 10 rivals have also been approached to run the same competition. Just don’t do it.
So, we built or have made some of the world’s smallest condoms. We knew Stuart Heritage of Hecklerspray had a good sense of humor, so we sent one of them to him. He spent the whole day on Twitter, taking photos of it, sharing it with his audience. Another example there, Optimus Prime, with a bayonet(?), (laughter) fantastic. My favorite one had to be this one which is the world’s biggest cock with the world’s smallest condom. (laughter) He spent the whole day teasing the audience like that on Twitter, getting people wondering what was going on. Then, at the end of the day, he hit them with a blog post about it. Again, I mentioned about sort of giving things back to the community providing value. Since he did that, Stuart has actually been approached by World Contraception Day, and he’s now one of their global ambassadors. He goes around schools talking to kids about condoms and safe sex in his sort of own irreverent fashion.
In terms of results, I’m not going to go to lots of statistics here. What we’ll tell you is that we created 1,400 % more impact than the previous years campaign when no social media was involved. So, we’d created something that created so many tweets, so many blog posts, sent so much traffic to the website that actually it really kick things into [xx] this year.
In terms of learnings, I think the one key learning for me is get all of your agencies and all of your people talking together. I didn’t actually get to meet the person that built or ran the website for this campaign until about a week before we went live. So, I’ve no influence in terms of content that would then keep people coming back to the site. I actually had to deliver the safe sex playlist through a blog because it’s the only thing we could throw together quick enough.
So, yes, get your digital guys, your PR guys, your marketing teams, internal and external, talking together beforehand, and get them collaborating on this stuff. Don’t treat social media as a magic bullet or something to just wrap around whatever else you’re doing.