Hasta La Creative!

There’s happiness inside every glass of milk. From blowing milk bubbles until you fill your whole apartment, to taking a cookie and slam-dunking it, like Michael Jordan, to seeing who’s milk moustache puts Tom Selleck to shame. Or, at least that’s what the new fantastical campaign from the BC Dairy Association and TAXI Vancouver, Pour A Little Happiness, seems to think.

A post-apocalyptic Los Angeles comes to life in VR and audio signals in Mayfly Quest, an unusual book-marketing campaign from author Jeff Sweat to promote the novel Mayfly.

Mayfly Quest explores new ways of telling stories and is intended to span the gap between Mayfly and its sequel, Scorpion. It decodes LA (now Ell Aye) a hundred years from now, long after a mysterious plague called the End has wiped out all adults and continues to kill kids before they reach the age of 17.

The Quest expands upon traditional online scavenger hunts with innovative technology, most notably by hacking Google Maps with 360-degree VR images of Los Angeles landmarks that have been “apocalypsized” and populated with clues to the cause of the End. The clues appear daily now through April 25 on Twitter @projectlonglife and on Instagram @jeffsweatbooks and can be redeemed at mayflybook.com for swag and bonus content like deleted scenes and short stories.

The campaign is unusual for book publishing, which rarely mounts the kind of campaigns that marketers do for entertainment and brands. Most book marketing tends to focus on getting books into the hands of people who weren’t already fans. For Mayfly, we wanted to reach people who didn’t know they should be fans. The marketing campaign drew heavily on Jeff’s own advertising and PR expertise, as well as his connections in the ad business.

The hunt also includes radio emergency broadcast signals that tell the story of The End in harrowing detail. The signals, which were promoted on Facebook, had a 74% video completion rate—almost four times the goal!

The signals freaked out LA residents who weren’t aware they were part of a book marketing campaign, with one commenter evoking Orson Welles and other saying, “This isn’t fake,” and “Whoever this is don’t be doing this sh** no more almost had a heart attack cuz you wanna advertise.” Then, YouTube banned the signals and the @jeffsweatbooks YouTube account for “severe violations” of its community guidelines.

Shazam! The number 1 box office hit has inspired real life heroes in Brazil, using the film to raise
awareness and to about the adoption and sponsoring of at risk youths in Brazil

In the last 95 years, Warner Bros. Pictures has told stories of superheroes: Batman, Robin, Superman, Shazam. In addition to their superpowers, these characters have something else in common: they were raised outside their birth families. There are approximately 9,500 children and adolescents up for adoption in Brazil. As Shazam! is one of the most anticipated movie launches this year, why not use the fame and the life story of Shazam! to raise awareness and inform people about the adoption and sponsoring of youths?

“Meet a real-life superhero” is a project created by J. Walter Thompson Brazil that began as extra content to Shazam!’s official trailer. At the end, a youth from a shelter called “real-life superhero,” invited people to learn more about his superpowers and to sponsor these children and adolescents in shelters. For more information, simply visit helendrexel.org.br, the website for the Brazilian foster care institution. On the site, one can see the story of 3 real-life superheroes: Super Actor, Super Nice and Super Empathy.

In partnership with the São Paulo Court of Justice and nine foster care institutions, 80 young people watched the premiere of the film Shazam!. The premier was a success. The second largest television network in the country was there to cover the event. “Meet a real-life superhero” generated much debate on a topic that is rarely addressed.

To celebrate Cengiz Ünder’s return to the team, AS Roma posted a video of his goals. A fan commented: “Even I could have scored that goal”. What’s next?

The British Columbia Construction Association’s message is clear: “Don’t Be A Tool”.

The British Columbia Construction Association (BCCA) launched a new anti-bullying and harassment campaign in April, to coincide with BC Construction Month. The BCCA, and Vancouver agency Rethink, released a series of animated spots that tackle problematic workplace behaviour with the tagline “Don’t Be A Tool”.

The campaign follows a year-long research project between BCCA and the Construction Workforce Equity Project that found three behaviours — bullying, hazing and sexual harassment—to be common problems in the industry. The series of three animated videos focus on each one of these behaviours with a unique and refreshing tone.

“It can help spark conversation and awareness to these behaviours on construction work sites or, for that matter, in any job,” says Chris Atchison, president of the B.C. Construction Association.

“Right now there are so many campaigns competing for our attention around the themes of workplace conduct, sexual harassment and gender equality,” says Morgan Tierney, Managing Partner at Rethink.”We needed to create something that would cut through and get noticed. Using cartoon characters allows us to look at a serious problem through an exaggerated, lighthearted lens, making the whole issue more approachable”

Out of the estimated 180,000 people working in B.C.’s construction industry, only five percent are women—something BCCA is working to change. They’re hoping this will improve worker retention overall and increase women to ten percent within the next decade.

This anti-bullying campaign is part of a larger Builders Code initiative to set a baseline code of conduction standard in construction and improve workplace behaviour.