Portfolio: Creative Strategies

Evolution of a Marketing Revolution Original methods were developed whereby promotional resources integrated the aims and principles into the campaign’s execution. Ideally these should be environmentally friendly, reusable and recyclable; useful enough not to be thrown away and designed specifically to be manufactured by the disadvantaged communities who are the ultimate ‘target market’. They should focus less on marketing hype and more on important messages. In this case they revolved around well-researched safety information that had never been exposed or even acknowledged before. The Red Cross Children’s Hospital had for some 30 years been unsuccessfully pressurising the oil industry to take responsibility for the truly appalling consequences of respiratory disease, accidental ingestion and devastating fires associated with the domestic use of paraffin. Clients should question the wisdom and morality of common advertising industry practises from an environmental, commercial and public image perspective. Ordering a million peaks, badges, stickers, plastic bags and key rings for the client’s account serves little purpose other than to have one’s branding all over stores and homes, whilst generating tons of junk for the waste stream and generous commissions for the agency. Bringing Awareness Into Homes The Shell Paraffin Campaign won the Overall Platinum Nedbank Sales Promotion & Design Award (SPADA) against 940 competitors countrywide. It won the SABS award for Innovative Industrial Design, as well as the Mayor’s Award and UN International Award for Child Safety. When we were first appointed to create the Shell paraffin campaign we were expected to do the same as the previous advertising agency - to spend a generous budget on the usual cheap, mass produced promotional junk, to be branded with the slogan: “Shel l Paraf f in Burns Br ight and Clean” However, paraffin is in fact unadulterated, highly explosive aviation fuel that burns with filthy, toxic plumes of black smoke when used in sub-standard appliances that are the norm due to the expense and unavailability of SABS approved paraffin appliances. It causes widespread respiratory disease, injury, trauma and painful deaths from burns, poisoning and suffocation. Whole communities are regularly razed to the ground, whilst hundreds of thousands of children accidentally inhale or ingest paraffin and die of chemical pneumonia. Though paraffin is a highly inflammable, lethal substance it is too expensive to package for the average SA household. It is therefore sold to the householder by being dispensed from a bulk storage tank into bottles previously used for juice, milk, etc. A national roadshow brought the hip hop Paraffin Safety Song to widespread communities, along with educational resources in eleven official languages. These were distributed to schools and clinics, along with the country’s first child proof closures, designed to fit most bottles commonly used to store paraffin.    < Prev