Client | Clemenger BBDO

[online youth infiltration campaign and guerilla marketing for Land Transport Safety Authority]


Clemenger BBDO contracted Breathe to help raise awareness about a new website aimed to educate youth about the dangers of speeding for their client, LTSA.

Our target audience was primarliy young men between the ages of 15 - 25.

The delivery consisted of four channels.

The first of these were the game-zones and chatrooms. Our approach focussed on the infiltration of key NZ game servers which facilitated popular games such as Counterstrike, Battlefield Earth and Medal of Honour. This included select placement of 'hedgehog' imagery (the website and campaign uses three hedgehog characters to convey message) around game maps and the use of hedgehog language by game Admin while monitoring gameplay. The 'spraying' of the hedgehog url on victims when they were terminated directed players from such gamezones and chatrooms to the hedgehog site on game on their session completion.

The second channel was using locally based underground radio station, Firmfm where we worked with presenters to allow them to drop in urls's, subtle language bites and character references into their daily chat.

Our third channel was Firmfms online community, freshlife.tv and its email lists. Here we utilised existing opt-in lists of youth peer group leaders and early adopters, and were able to seed the lists with URL and appropriate referneces to te hedgehogs.

Our final channel were takeaway shops! I devised an A2 newsprint 'newspaper' that was printed with the url set amongst a host of stories relevant t o the target audience - surf, cars, boarding etc... with a ream of copies sent to 21 'fish'n'chip' shops around New Zealand free of charge. Staff were instructed to wrap customers orders in the wrapper, the customer then driven wild with curiosity(!) would read the newspaper whilst eating this lunch. The success of this was outstanding, the shops were requesting countless more reams and some even put newspapers on their walls for decoration.

The campaign was both unique in its approach as well as being highly successful, attracting over 500 unique visitors in its first week.