Have you ever wondered what a Chlamydia looks like? Curiosity. That is the basis of the campaign orchestrated for the Ministry of Health by Cartier Communication and their media partners: Vizéum and Espresso Media. Yannick Manuri from Espresso Media shares his insights on this daring campaign developed with Eyeblaster and ALT Productions.

Based on the theme ‘Quite often, there is nothing to see’ overall campaign efforts included posters, bus shelters, Internet, stands in several colleges, as well as tactical and viral events. As ‘nine people out of 10 don’t know that they have an STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease)’ the campaign wanted to remind youth that ‘because you look safe’ is not a valid argument for not using a condom.


The first part of the campaign execution was a video that is circulating on You Tube and various social media sites. The video stars an opera-theatre piece created and presented just before Valentine’s Day throughout eight colleges in Quebec. At the peak of lunch time, in the cafeteria, what seems to be the beginning of a couple’s fight regarding a STD becomes an entertaining musical comedy.





The viral scattering of this video just started and has already generated over 11 000 views on You Tube. The video segment was also integrated in the content portion of several popular sites such as: 33mag.ca, Bombe.tv, Ckoi.com, Cinoche.com, etc.


THE TARGET AND STRATEGY

Espresso Media handled the online portion of this campaign. To reach this highly coveted target audience (15-24 year olds), we needed to be creative in order to surprise them and captivate their attention.
We strongly believed that a standard ad banner would not effectively reach this audience. Actually, we think that one is very disconnected from today’s reality if they believe that a simple bigbox campaign on sites such as musiqueplus.com is efficient to reach the target.


The campaign was based on:
- Innovation in the choice of ad formats, betting on the ‘newness’ factor
- Creation of a new and impactful ad format
- Investment in interactive and engaging ad pieces
- Favour video utilization


The development process of the online portion of the campaign was one of the most intricate that we have done here at the agency. Actually it’s probably the most complex project of my career! As far as I know, you can count on a single hand the number of times that this type of ad format has been executed in Canada.


This took over 50 hours of work by our media team, without counting all the hours of development and programming done by our technological partners ALT Productions and Eyeblaster.


The execution was so elaborate for the team that at one point we even questioned the feasibility of the entire project. On several occasions we thought that our ideas were too ambitious, and that we would be better off finding a plan B. It is with a huge sigh of relief that we proudly share the details of this new execution that will, without a doubt, surprise more than one!


EXECUTION DETAILS

In order to attract the target’s attention, we opted for a wallpaper format, with a rather surprising creative, across several popular sites reaching the youth target. With the agreement of the sites’ editorial teams, we replaced the usual backgrounds of each site with a picture of a young man/woman wearing nothing but underwear. Once we had grabbed the user’s attention, it was hard to not be intrigued by the banner where the message was ‘Touch me and I will show you what a Chlamydia looks like’.


Once the banner was clicked, the entire site folded towards the bottom. The underwear of the young man/woman was also pulled down in synch with the content of the site. This made room for the message ‘Quite often, you can’t see Chlamydia. Condoms, 100% OK. Youhaveonelife.com.”
In order to make this execution believable, we had to reproduce a constantly updated replicate of the homepage (content and layout) and overlay it on the wallpaper background. We personalized this for each site, each homepage.

The reactions to this campaign are numerous in news & information media and daily talk TV shows.

Touch and see the results for yourself….