MNCASA — Underwear

Challenge

To change behaviors and understanding of a serious issue within a very tough demographic—16-24 year old males. This audience does not listen to messaging from establishments and cares even less about public health initiatives.

Approach

The non-profit client had a small budget, but ambitious goals of creating a TV campaign that could be run by stations donating air-time, while also posting the videos online in hopes of it going viral.

We knew that in order for it to go viral and get in front of our intended audience it needed to be entertaining and not perceived as a serious message that was talking down at them.

We created what looked to be amateur videos of kids pulling pranks on one another, then delivered a hard hitting message at the end of them.

Positioned date rape in a way that they could understand from a parallel, but not nearly as serious, scenario.

Outcome

People paid attention. Some of our audience felt “duped” by the messaging tactics, but it proved to us that they listened. Because this campaign was actually from before the days of YouTube (can you even imagine now?) the videos lived on a simple microsite that did not track views, but it seemed to have some viral traction. (Now that YouTube exists, to-date the campaign has over 70,000 views)

The campaign was also nominated for an Emmy Award. We had a very low-budget for this non-profit client, but it didn’t matter because we had a great idea that could be executed in a low-budget fashion.

The campaign was conceived, directed, and cast by Mark Sorensen and his copywriter, Troy Longie, while working at a great, independent Minneapolis agency. Edited by Channel Z.