2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

In Lebanon, citizens suffer from the absence of an official national blood bank, which makes it extremely challenging for people in need of blood to actually obtain it, except by desperately contacting friends and family. In light of this very challenging situation, DSC’s mission is to address the lack of a government-endorsed process by creating a database of potential blood donors to answer the largest possible number of demands. This mission was set alongside an ambitious objective of recruiting 10,000 new donors with a zero dollars budget.

Creative Execution

The campaign line “Hess aa dammak” (literally means “feel on your blood”) is a popular Lebanese expression commonly used to address someone who doesn’t seem to care in order to provoke his reaction. The somewhat harsh tonality of the campaign’s line was deliberately selected to shake the status quo and move people. Since we had no budget we decided to bank on the viral potential of the stunt, which was originally devised with this objective in mind. Thus, the initial and exclusive medium we opted for was DSC’s social media assets - mainly Facebook and YouTube – knowing that people in need of blood traditionally consult such platforms to try their luck with friends or even total strangers.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Based on the insight that ‘asking for blood contributions feels like begging’ and on the fact that street beggars are found at every major intersection in Beirut, we organized a stunt of undercover volunteers knocking on cars windows to beg… for blood. This was to remind people of what Lebanese families go through when a loved one is in need of blood, highlighting the absurdity of having to beg for it to save a life. We filmed the stunt with hidden cameras and posted it online in order to create a buzz and maximize our reach.

Results

The stunt went viral overnight, with more than 15,000 views in just 2 days and just as many in the days that followed. It generated great conversations on social media and was also covered by major newspapers, radio stations, sites and blogs. It even aired on prime time news on 3 major TV local stations and DSC representatives were invited to talk about it in their morning shows. DSC’s phone didn’t stop ringing and donor subscriptions went up by 250%, which goes to show what you can do with a small piece of paper and a lot of good will.