Winners & Shortlists

??N? THE FIREWALL

Title??N? THE FIREWALL
BrandTOURETTES ACTION UK
Product/ServiceEMAIL
Category B02. BEST LOW BUDGET CAMPAIGN
Entrant Company LIDA London, UNITED KINGDOM
Advertising Agency LIDA London, UNITED KINGDOM
Credits
Name Company Position
Nicky Bullard LIDA Executive Creative Director
Andrew Pogson LIDA Art Director
Dan Wright LIDA Copywriter
Victoria Fox LIDA Managing Director
Gita Mackintosh LIDA Account Director
Chris Cannacott LIDA Digital Project Manager
Adam Reader LIDA Social Media Strategist

The Brief

Tourette Syndrome affects over 300,000 people in the UK, but public awareness is low. People affected can suffer from extreme symptoms, which are often misunderstood as antisocial behaviour. In severe cases, this leads to complete social exclusion as they are effectively filtered out by an intolerant society. We wanted to break through the social barriers and stigma that stop people with Tourette Syndrome from being accepted by society. By designing an innovative, viral message that was impossible to filter out or ignore, we wanted to raise awareness and challenge attitudes.

Creative Execution

Hitting your contact list with the subject line, ‘Forward this ɹǝʞɔnɟ to everyone you know’, takes enormous courage. But our email, signed by the Chief Executive of Tourettes Action, Suzanne Dobson, was designed to get a reaction. The use of bad language was calculated and highly relevant to our message. We wanted to raise awareness of Tourette Syndrome and challenge attitudes towards the condition by breaking through the social barriers and stigma that surround it. Using swear words made our subject line and email impossible to ignore, while the shock factor helped our message to spread virally.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Our disruptive email was sent to a small audience of key influencers and bloggers, hand-picked by the Chief Executive of Tourettes Action, Suzanne Dobson. We made the email sharable through social channels to amplify the campaign and help it to go viral. To avoid being blocked by email filters, we used hidden characters, which exist in popular font sets. This allowed us to write our expletives upside down, while still remaining perfectly legible. To the human eye, the characters look like rude words upside down, but to a computer they were just symbols so the words could not be blocked.

Results

In the first 24 hours, the email was forwarded four times for every one sent. The hashtag #ʞɔnɟthefirewall gained 88,659 estimated impressions. The campaign was promoted by numerous bloggers and reached 80,000 Twitter users. It more than doubled our charity’s engagement rate on Facebook to 18%.