Stinky PSA campaign causes a real-life gas leak panic

Via NY Daily News

Here's a funny one.

According to the Great Falls Tribune, reports of a major natural gas leak in the Montana city's business section caused the evacuation of several buildings yesterday.

The cause? Scratch-n-sniff direct mailers designed to educate the public about what a gas leak smells like:

Nick Bohr, general manager at Energy West, said workers at the company were cleaning out some storage areas and discarded several boxes of scratch-and-sniff cards that it sent out to customers in the past to educate them on what natural gas smells like. 

“They were expired, and they were old,” Bohr said. “They threw them into the Dumpsters.” 

When the cards were picked up by sanitation trucks and crushed, “It was the same as if they had scratched them.”

Natural gas doesn't have a detectable odour of its own, but has a chemical (t-butyl mercaptan or thiophane) added to give it a foul "rotten egg" smell so that people can detect leaks.

Via Philly.com

Energy West had been distributing the PSA cards to customers as part of a safety awareness campaign.

“In a sense, it worked the way it was supposed to,” commented Nick Bohr, general manager at Energy West, as part of the company's apology for the inconvenience. They also mentioned that there was no public safety or environmental concern about putting the expired cards in the trash.

If you want stinky PSA stickers of your own, you can order them by the thousand here.

Tip via The Consumerist

Put your baby to sleep with a hairdryer?

I'm trying to figure out these Ogilvy Poland ads for Philips hairdryers. Apparently, "white noise" is good for putting kids to sleep. But putting a corded, heat-producing device in a crib and turning it on?

Reminds me of this campaign:

...in a bad way.

Via Ads of The World

Volkswagen Golf: Saviour of hedgehogs

Hedgehogs are the common roadkill of Europe. The poor little bastards have the unfortunate habit of rolling into a prickly ball instead of running from danger — hardly a match for an oncoming car.



It's extremely cute, and a smart way to promote the new Golf's various safety features.

And in racially-charged Europe, it's even pro-immigrant! Because those cute little guys they show in close-up are actually African hedgehogs. I know, I used to have one.

This is a European hog.

Putting out cooking fires in urinals

I've heard of this "drinking and frying" issue before, but it was in Wales. Guys were going home wasted, putting bacon, sausage or eggs on the stove, then passing out and allowing the grease to ignite.

I guess Kiwi men have the same weakness for late-night eggs'n'bake. So this campaign by the NZ government uses heat-reactive urinal stickers to remind men — while they're peeing out that last pint — to grab some takeout on the way home instead. (How appetizing!)

Via Creative Criminals

I think late-night junk food takeout joints here in Canada should take advantage of this issue in their POP marketing: "poutine saves lives"

In the short term, anyway...

Ah yes, the "kid in bubble wrap" cliché...

I'll admit it. I've had this idea come up in creative sessions about family safety issues on many, many occasions.

via AOTW

But do you know why we don't end up using it? Because GIS, that's why.

When your "there's a better way..." concept is already a tired cliché in stock photo libraries and mommy blogs, it's time to start over. 

And not just with different materials, either...

F'd Ad Fridays: Is it a warning or a "how to" ad?

Via imgur

Augmented reality hits the streets

KIA took an interesting approach to promoting its new Punto Evo. Rather than using QR codes, which are already common, they developed a smart phone app (iPhone and Android only) that reads standardized, well-defined, high-contrast shapes that are all over the urban landscape: traffic signs.



Here's more explanation:

"For example; a STOP sign will tell the user all about the new breaking system, a CURVE ahead sign will tell the user that the car has an intelligent lighting system that guides you in curves. And the list goes on with every sign and feature of the car."

This is a European campaign by Leo Burnett Iberia in Madrid,  so your mileage may vary if you try it on another continent's standard signs. (See full credits at their YouTube link)

Meanwhile, in New York City, new interactive LED signs are reminding drivers who break the new 30 MPH (~48 km/h) that they are significantly more likely to kill a pedestrian in case of a collision:

I like this approach much better than the KIA one. First of all, as I'm an urban pedestrian it's a cause I feel passionate about. Second, I'm a little worried that the traffic sign game by KIA will actually lead to crashes between distracted walkers and drivers.

The creepiest safety video of all time

Kerry sent this to me.



Although the person who posted it claimed:

"This video was discovered by someone who used to work at a public library several years ago. This has not been edited in any way. This is 100% authentic."

I'm pretty sure it has been doctored hard. But who cares? Spurting blood, severed appendages, and a soundtrack that sounds like Jefferson Airplane after accidentally taking the brown acid... epic weirdness.

Happy weekend.

Social Branding

As integrated Social Issues Marketing specialists, we do more than PSAs at Acart. A big part of our business includes the branding of campaigns and programs that change attitudes, provoke action and improve lives.

One of our recently-launched social brands is Hazardcheck, a Health Canada program to help Canadians identify and reduce environmental health hazards in their homes.



Our stated objective was to create a brand that could be the next "Participaction" — that is, an engaging and potentially grassroots campaign that could be used as a basis for ongoing communication about home hazards.

As you can imagine, we went through a long process of generating naming options. We put together a large think-tank of creative and strategic people, and I moderated one of the most intense brainstorming sessions we've ever had. And, of course, it had to be developed concurrently in English and French.



Next, we worked on identifiers for the program that would get a strong message across without being overly shocking.

I can't tell you what else was on our shortlist, but "Hazardcheck" was the winner.



As a parent, I really appreciated the chance to work on something so basic, and yet so essential, to helping people keep their families in good health. Doing research for the branding project, I also learned a few new things to look out for.

Social branding is all about making important things simple and relevant. I think we've done that with the development of a plain-language name that is also a call-to-action, as well as an internet-inspired icon that communicates both "home" and "caution".

Our next job was to develop a Guide and other materials to promote the new brand. And a video is now in the works. (Maybe someday they'll let me write a Participaction-esque jingle!)



Get the information you need to keep your family healthy and safe at http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ewh-semt/hazards-risques/index-eng.php

PSAs we really need: School Bus Passing

I can't find it anywhere on line, but the vintage road safety PSA is burned into my Gen-X brain. The beginning is a little fuzzy, but it shows school kids (my age, at the time) getting off a school bus with its stop sign out and its lights flashing. A car ignores the signals — and the legal requirement to stop — and the spot ends with an echoing scream and a freeze frame on one of the little girls, books in hand, looking in horror as she's about to be killed.

Old-school shock advertising, But let me tell you, when I was getting my Driver's Licence a decade later, I sure as Hell knew you don't pass a school bus with its lights flashing on a two-lane street.

And yet, in the past month, I have personally witnessed four separate examples of cars zipping past stopped school busses with all their signals out. The bus driver honked, but they didn't even slow down. Whether they were younger drivers or moved here from elsewhere, I don't think they saw the spot.

They should. It's amazing how some of the rules of the road that we take for granted seem to be off the radar for many drivers. Every day, I see examples of drivers running red lights and stop signs at intersections, cutting off pedestrian crosswalks, and failing to pull over when an emergency vehicle is trying to get through, sirens wailing. (Yeah, I live and work downtown.)

I could wax all moralistic about the selfishness of our current urban society, but I think social marketing has a role to play here. We need to keep these basic road safety messages out there, and we need to find creative ways of hammering them home.

Take something as simple as seat belts. People in Europe are slow to buckle up. But the Embrace Life campaign that has been burning up the viral world (I keep receiving it from friends and colleagues, even though in some cases I'm the one who originally shared it with them!) is putting the issue on the radar worldwide. (If you want more background on the campaign, Marc from the global social marketing blog Osocio sent me a collaborative interview they conducted with the client, published on Facebook.)

The era of '70s Drivers' Ed shock films may be over, but the need for strong messages on basic road safety is as great as ever. If anyone in the private, public or NGO sectors is interested in trying to develop a partnership for a new campaign on school bus safety, send me a live at results[at sign]acart.com, and write "attn. Tom" in the header.

A new, and scary, kind of online PSA

If you haven't been to Please Rob Me yet, you should do so now. Not because you are in any imminent danger, but because it's an interesting new development in public service announcements.

Created by Dutch designers and developers Barry Borsboom, Frank Groeneveld, and Boy van Amstel, Please Rob Me is just a template for displaying a specific type of Twitter search, one that amalgamates Tweets from voluntarily location-aware applications like Foursquare, and uses the context to tell everyone that the Twitterer is no longer at home.

From the developers:

"Hey, do you have a Twitter account? Have you ever noticed those messages in which people tell you where they are? Pretty annoying, eh. Well, they're actually also potentially pretty dangerous. We're about to tell you why.

Don't get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome.

...

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home."

And here's why I think this qualifies as a social marketing PSA:

"The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information."

Mashable adds:

"These guys have a legitimate point. Stories about status updates leading to burglaries are becoming commonplace. You may remember that video podcaster Israel Hyman was robbed after tweeting that he was out was out town, and there’s even evidence to support the notion that burglars are turning to social media to find their targets."

It's an interesting way of raising awareness of the way social media power-users are giving away far more information than they may have bargained for. But I wonder if it breaks any privacy laws itself. We'll see.

Copywronging

I really hate to do this, because it's an important campaign for a very serious cause, but who on earth let these ads run with this headline?




If you don't get it, don't feel bad. It just means you're less cynical and paranoid than the average agency or client person. We have to let our minds crawl into the gutter to troubleshoot headlines and images for unintentional (and very unfortunate!) double entendres or easy and damaging parodies. Something everyone involved in these ads seems to have failed to do.

There's a third execution, BTW. And I have no issue with it.



I've seen this campaign on the sides of busses in Ottawa since before Christmas, but failed to get a picture in time. Ironically, I could never remember the call-to-action, and I was afraid that even trying to Google the campaign would get me on some sort of RCMP watchlist. Just this morning, though, I finally found a story about it on CTV.

Cybertip.ca, a national tip line for suspected cases of child exploitation on the Internet, gets operating money from communications giants Bell, Telus, Shaw, MTS Alstream, and SaskTel, among others — including the Government of Canada and the Government of Manitoiba (where the project began).

Obviously, it's in everyone's interest to protect kids while still keeping the Internet reasonably liberated. But as both a creative professional and a parent, I just think it's a shame they didn't look at that copy one more time.

Still don't see it? Good for you. It's better that way.