The Reach For A Dream Foundation: OPEN BOOK PROJECT

Credits & Description:

Type of entry: Technique
Category: Celebrity Endorsement
Advertiser: THE REACH FOUNDATION
Product/Service: AWARENESS CAMPAIGN
Agency: DDB GROUP MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Advertiser THE REACH FOUNDATION
Product AWARENESS CAMPAIGN
Entrant DDB GROUP MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Type of Entry: Technique
Category: Celebrity Endorsement
Title: OPEN BOOK PROJECT
Advertiser/Client: THE REACH FOUNDATION
Product/Service: AWARENESS CAMPAIGN
Entrant Company: DDB GROUP MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
DM/Advertising Agency: DDB GROUP MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Executive Creative Director: Grant Rutherford (DDB Group Melbourne)
Creative Director: Nick Cummins (DDB Group Melbourne)
Art Director: Daniel Grech (DDB Group Melbourne)
Copywriter: Stefanie Diagianvincenzo (DDB Group Melbourne)
Digital Designer: Jonathan Yuen (DDB Group Melbourne)
Programmer: Carlo Cruz (DDB Group Melbourne)
Digital Producer: Melissa Pillay (DDB Group Melbourne)
Account Service: Jess Brophy (DDB Group Melbourne)
Director: Luci Schroeder (The Directors Group)
Producer: Craig Griffin (The Directors Group)
Sound Designer: Matt Thompson (Risk Sound)
Music Design: (Gasinc)
Editor: Luci Schroeder (The Directors Group)
Editor: Marissa Brain (DDB Group Melbourne)
Describe the campaign/entry
Our challenge with this campaign was to find something emotionally engaging that all Australians could relate to. Reach wanted something real that would demonstrate a level of bravery and vulnerability to reflect their brand personality. It was important that the message convey that everyone faces challenges during their younger years, even the most successful and famous people. With a budget of just $40,000 we felt PR and social media would be the best channels to create awareness and public engagement. So we created The Open Book Project. The first phase was a call for entries to celebrities asking them to submit their own intimate diary confessions to our website, www.openbookproject.com.au.
We also produced outdoor, press, radio and direct marketing from the celebrity’s diary entries. This in turn encouraged visitors to the site to submit their own teenage diary entries and post their stories via Facebook. As our celebrity’s stories spread through the media, the public became captive. What started as a trickle soon became a flood of entries with more people sharing their real life stories.
Describe the brief from the client
With a budget of just $40,000 we felt PR and social media would be the best channels to create awareness and public engagement to achieve our objectives.
Objectives
• Gain the support of celebrities to share their real teen stories
• Show Australians what Reach does
• Demonstrate that everyone, even the most successful and famous Australians, have challenges during their teen years
• Have young people realise that they’re not alone
• Create a dialogue with teenagers
• Create talkability with widespread attraction to the campaign
• Achieve mass media support on a limited budget

Results

The campaign was very successful in its awareness objective reaching 9.1m Australians with 59,994 page views and an average site visit of 5 minutes over the one-month campaign period.
Due to huge media interest in our celebrity stories and the Reach cause we achieved $1,271,440.78 of editorial coverage across TV, print, radio and online mediums for the $40,000 outlay.

Creative Execution

This was a month-long campaign only.
The first phase was a call for entries to celebrities, actors, TV and radio personalities, politicians, sports stars, musicians and comedians asking them to submit their own intimate diary confessions to our website, www.openbookproject.com.au.
Then popular radio and TV personalities also offered their support to the campaign by reading their stories live on air, giving us widespread media awareness of the program for zero media cost.
We also produced outdoor, press, radio and direct marketing using extracts from the celebrity’s diary entries. This in turn encouraged visitors to the site to submit their own teenage diary entries and post their stories via Facebook.
As our celebrity’s stories spread through the media, the public became captive. What started as a trickle soon became a flood of entries with more people sharing their real life stories.


National youth organisation, Reach, believes every teenager should have the support and self-belief to fulfil their potential, regardless of their situation. They connect with more than 57,000 young Australians and run 500 workshops each year. Their challenge is that most Australians aren’t aware of them. Reach approached us to develop an inexpensive awareness campaign, highlighting the fact that they encourage young people to develop trust, openness, and feel comfortable enough to express their concerns.


Our strategy was to create conversations online about teenage struggles of all sizes. Our insight was that we all had aspirations and struggles when we were young and many of us only shared them with our personal diaries.
As teenagers we captured our raw emotions on the pages of these diaries that now have become time capsules of our frightened and frustrated pasts. What if we all shared these diaries as a way of showing support to youth and starting a conversation about Reach and its programs? And even better, what if we could view the personal diaries of celebrities written before their fame? That would surely spark the interest of the media and get people interested and talking.