Campaigns to admire #3: Missing Blood Type
I don’t make a habit of attending award ceremony things, but for various reasons I found myself at a few in 2016. The pattern of each event became familiar. I would wear the same suit, search out the same free wine, and heartily enjoy watching the Missing Blood Type team win in every category they stood. Including a fair few of ours.
And there was a strong reason for that. All the rest of us brands there had done pretty well at using the channels available to us, to reach the audiences we were trying to reach, with the stories we wanted to tell. The Missing Blood Type team had gone beyond the obvious channels, and into the actual world.
They headed straight to other prominent brands, and told their story there instead.
Specifically, they went to 1000 organisations, and asked them to remove the A, O and B from their real-world signage and social media branding. These organisations included those as small fry as Google, McDonalds, and the Church of England. This is what the actual sign on Downing Street looked like at the time…
The City of Westminster team supported the Missing Blood Type campaign across their patch, including here at their most famous location.
When people went in search of why, those organisations and the campaign channels themselves had lined up to talk about the types of blood that were missing and that were desperately needed. Then they asked for volunteers. 30,000 new donors registered during the first week alone.
I’ve spent a lot of time evaluating the impact of campaigns and I’ve never seen a stat as directly convincing as that. And it was enough to cement it in my mind at the pinnacle of campaigning approaches. It’s so simple, really, but so damn effective.
Because there’s something incredibly admirable about an image that seems ubiquitous. One that every other person seems to mention, or send, so that it feels like it’s everywhere around you. A campaign which stretches outside the boundaries of its own echo chamber and metaphorically slaps you around the chops with its presence.
Yet there’s something somehow even more admirable about that image representing your exact campaign message in a sentence: the letters were missing, because the blood types were missing.
I’m not the only person who admired it by the way. PR Week called it the ‘Campaign of the Decade’, saying it was ‘among the most inventive and creative of its time’. And I couldn’t agree more.
If you’d like to see examples, I’d highly recommend a few happy minutes scrolling the image search for ‘missing blood type campaign’. But I’ll close instead by encouraging everyone to consider registering to give blood, if they can. The NHS always need new donors.