All at sea

More gold than a Dubai hotel's bathroom. More gold than Mr T's jewellery box. More gold than Clifford Price's dentist.

That’s what a campaign for the RNLI achieved at the DMA Awards last week. 9 golds and the grand prix.

I don’t know if that’s a record, but it can’t be far off. (One of the few it didn’t win was ‘Best Launch’, as someone wittily pointed out.)

Anyway, if you get a chance to look at the work, you should. It’s very good. Very clever, very creative and a worthy award winner. Because awards should reward new ideas, innovative approaches and the like. 

And in the case of the DMAs, they always consider the results to be very important too. So, the results of this campaign for the RNLI? 8,000 texts for one – and ok, 8,000 is not a particularly impressive number, but also a million of the target audience viewed videos online.

Now a million is an impressive number. 1,000,000 of their target audience.

Their target audience being – wait for it – ‘15 to 20 year olds’.

Now I don’t want to rock the boat (pardon the pun) but... why?

Why bother engaging 15 to 20 year olds with the work of a lifeboat charity?

Not to raise any money, certainly – not a single monetary reference is made in the results. It wasn’t the objective; the objective was to ‘engage’ them.

BUT WHY?

I don’t understand. Am I missing something?

Engaging them wasn’t in order to raise money from them... it wasn’t to get them to do a sponsored event... it wasn’t to get them to volunteer... it wasn’t to ask them to use their pester power on mum and dad... it wasn’t to encourage them to be safe at sea...

As far as I can tell, the aim was to engage them for engagement’s sake.

Of course, it may be that these 15 to 20 year olds stay engaged with the RNLI and do eventually become supporters of the charity. In 30 to 40 years’ time. (Although I don’t know if the RNLI can stay in touch with them – they viewed videos, after all, which doesn’t require any data capture.)

I know I’m sounding a bit snippy, and I don’t mean to be, because it is a really imaginative and captivating piece of work, and I can see why DMA judges went for it in a big way.

I just don’t know what the point of it was. 

Instead, I can only imagine what great things the agency would have achieved for the client if they'd put all that effort and enthusiasm into targeting people who might actually become donors.