The Challenge:
The awareness campaign we created for The Lutheran Foundation encouraged parents to talk to their children about drugs and alcohol. But there was no way to measure if that was really happening. The client wanted tangible data to prove if the audience was listening to the message and engaging with it.
Discover
There’s a wealth of information out there about drugs and alcohol. The key was finding something that would pique the interest of parents. We realized that it had to be something that was truly informative. We wanted to get the message across that there may be things about this subject they don’t already know about. By browsing the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA’s) website, we found a list of slang terms and code words for drugs. What interested us were the many names that sounded like “everyday” items. For example, “gum” is another word for heroin and “fries” is slang for crack. It showed how drug culture can be hidden in everyday speech. We also discovered a quiz based off of the list and thought it was the perfect way to connect with parents.
Develop
It wasn’t enough to put a link to the quiz on The Lutheran Foundation’s website. We first had to get parents TO the website. To do that, we developed a strategy that used several tactics to reel them in. Because we had an extensive media buy, we didn’t depend on one type of medium to tell the story. We would just give highlights to entice the audience to the site and once there, they could get the full picture.
Deliver
Outdoor advertising served as a great teaser. We put together a series of five designs to showcase some interesting examples of today’s drug lingo. Then we used radio to build on the story we started in the billboards. Display and social media ads were also created under the same concept to round out the campaign.
The Results:
The response to the quiz was impressive. Almost immediately, people came to the website to take the quiz. By creating a landing page to link to the DEA’s quiz, we could easily measure the interest and analyze the traffic. The feedback was so great, the client gave us approval to create our own quiz for the next wave of the campaign.
In one week:
3,900 people took the quiz.
4,400 users visited the website.
Web traffic grew 41% over the previous month.