Go (fuck yourself) Compare

I've made a habit on this blog of mentioning projects that my friends mention on social media. And this one is especially satisfying as so many were taken in by it. I'm talking, of course, of Dare's "graffitied" Go Compare billboards that have been appearing round the place.

Here's one friend who was taken in even though he studies advertising...

...and another one who fell for it on Facebook.

As luck would have it, Dare CD Laura Jordan-Bambach was in the School mentoring yesterday and gave us some useful insight into the lengths they went to in order to hoodwink people.

Firstly, they made sure that only one poster in a certain area would appear to be vandalised, to increase the likelihood of someone seeing an unspoiled one. Secondly, they printed the "graffiti" parts at a much higher resolution than the rest of the poster, to make it look more realistic.

It's a useful little lesson into craft and attention to detail - if the campaign hadn't fooled anyone it could have backfired badly.

Time to Change - Mental Health

This ad was actually linked to by a friend on Facebook. This happens so rarely that I thought I'd better take a look and write about it. It's created by Dare for 2 of Britain's major mental health charities, Mind and Rethink.

The main problem of the ad is that the part where they display misconceptions about mental illness is more deftly executed than the message. The exposition with the unrealistic inner monologue and clunky exposition ("oh it's Dave who was off on work with mental illness") and the still somewhat rather stilted conversation at the end are the weakest parts. It felt like people saying what they're supposed to say, rather than what they would actually say (something I was told off for by my Head of Copywriting when writing radio ads raising awareness of STIs).

The middle section is much stronger - I thought the acoustic gig was a great touch. And I should mention, to be fair, that my Facebook friend praised the ads. However, as someone already fairly enlightened about mental health already, he wasn't exactly the target.