Getting technical

DESCRIPTION

Danish Technical Schools had become undesirable to 15-17 year-olds, being at the bottom of the educational hierarchy. As a short-term objective, they desperately needed to improve the self-perception and identity of the technical schools’ teachers and students; The long-term objective was to improve the image held by graduating primary school students and general public opinion.

The insight was that the notion of “technical creativity” held special interest with the young target audiences, supported by their high viewing figures of TV programmes like Pimp my Ride and Project Runway. Based on this insight, the solution was to inject creativity and playfulness directly into the educational process by creating a platform where students could showcase their creative skills to peers and potential students.

This platform was the “Act Out Awards”, an award show rewarding best use of technical creativity among technical schools students. First, the message was seeded via 25,000 “Act Out” street dolls around primary and technical schools, and online with short viral films demonstrating real creative thinking plus a tab on MSN Messenger and a website encouraging user-generated creative content.
For the second phase, students were engaged with the commencement of the awards competition in all local technical schools, giving students one full day to create their own technical projects. An online peer-to-peer voting mechanism was set up to shortlist 12 finalists to appear at the awards final and ceremony.

The results were massive PR coverage and return on investment for the media campaign. With more than 150,000 viewings of the viral films during campaign period and more than 50,000 viewings to date, the viral spread reached 230%. 155,000 unique visitors entered the official website while the MSN tab had 150,000 views and 20% click through.

Press coverage extended from local to national TV and print, creating additional PR value of 65% of campaign budget. Due to the awards’ popularity, several technical schools have integrated technical creativity into the regular curriculum and the awards are now an annual event.

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