TREKSTOCK Proposal Statement

The campaign proposal for this live brief is made up of two parts: a poster campaign and a viral social media campaign. This two-pronged approach raises awareness of the charity, as well as fundraising. The campaign has been produced by myself and Georgina Lowe.

The initial concept was the idea of using objects as metaphors, potentially for different types of cancer. This sparked my initial research into charity campaigns that have done something similar. For example, the Hong Kong Cancer Fund uses fire alarms to represent breasts, and Worldwide Breast Cancer uses lemons.

This lead to us coming up with our own ideas of objects that could represent types of cancer:

• Different types of balls – testicular cancer
• Balloons – lung cancer
• Bakewell tarts/cherry buns – breast cancer
• Whoopee cushion – bowel cancer
• Eggs – ovarian cancer
• Sunglasses – eye cancer

The idea of using these in a poster campaign then became an ideal opportunity. I then created visual mood boards for Georgina to then use to photograph these objects for the posters. For the poster design, my aim was for the whole photograph to fill the page, rather than cut out the objects and paste on plain coloured background. The latter has often been done in other campaigns that use objects as metaphors, such as the M&S Breast Cancer campaign, and so wanted to have a different style of image. Having the photos in real-life settings, such as a whoopee cushion on a chair in a sitting room of a house, instead of just an image of a whoopee cushion on a plain background, evokes the link of reality and how real cancer is in peoples’ everyday lives.

Each poster possesses the Trekstock logo in the bottom right hand corner, as well as the tagline, ‘supporting young people with all types of cancer’. This tagline then allows the strapline for each poster to relate to the type of cancer reflected in the poster. The posters would be located on billboards, public transport, social media and the Trekstock website.

The second part of our campaign revolves around the concept of viral social media. Inspired by the ALS ‘ice bucket challenge’ and Cancer Research’s ‘no make-up selfie’, the idea is for participants to pose for photos or videos related to the posters. For example, a women would hold up cherry cakes in front of her breasts, or someone would film themselves sitting on whoopee cushions. Participants would then post the photo on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram etc., and nominate three people to go next. Each participant would donate £3 to Trekstock via text message themselves and encourage others to, as well as promote the hashtag ‘#poseforpower’ in their posts. Trekstock ambassadors would also take part and help set the trend, to promote publicity.