This month's PR Campaigns chosen by the Sunny Bird PR team include colourful street art in cities across the country, a seagull in Weymouth teaching us some environmental lessons, a project in the US rewarding people for recycling and a war against the Best Before date.
Dulux paints the town…colourful
Dulux’s relationship with its consumer was typically conducted through a giant, shaggy dog until the brand’s colour campaigns came along. There have been a series of these ranging from partnerships with Olympians to injecting colour back into the prohibition era. Our favourite colour campaign from Dulux is this one; an outdoor PR and experiential campaign that saw illustrators paint city murals across the UK to demonstrate how colour can transform surroundings.
The campaign, called 'Colour Britain' comprised of eight giant murals and artworks hand painted onto canvases in town squares around the country.
The sites were designed by illustrators to celebrate stories of history, heritage, colour and culture from cities across Britain. Dulux wanted the canvas murals to create a positive atmosphere in high streets and town squares with their bright hues. The public chose local stories to inspire the artworks, with Liverpool’s featuring The Beatles, Birmingham’s celebrating the modern British curry and London’s highlighting the iconic black cab.
The eights murals were painted at a location chosen by the public using #colourbritain and the illustrators included Anna Kilpelainen, Adrian Johnson and Emily Forgot. Interviews with the artists and time-lapse videography of the installations were also designed which formed the basis of social media content for the brand.
"We believe that life is a story that deserves a colourful backdrop and as such this initiative champions use of vibrant colour in unusual locations to truly brighten people's daily lives," said Johnny Corbett, Dulux Marketing Manager.
Getting the public involved in this experiential campaign from the start meant that when the murals were going up the locals were invested and interested. This natural pride in #lovewhereyoulive would have encouraged a steady flow of social media posts allowing the Dulux campaign to be shared outside of those eight cities.
Fun, regional campaign gains national interest
Isn’t it a pain when a seagull sneakily steals a chip out of your hands?! A recent regional PR campaign has gained traction within the national media by using some fun, cheeky seagulls to spread an important environmental message.
Litter Free Coast & Sea is a community campaign that aims to reduce marine and beach litter and improve bathing water quality in Devon and Dorset. The latest campaign, cleverly named ‘don’t feed the locals’, aims to highlight the problem that litter can cause when it comes to greedy gulls. Rubbish left on beaches encourages seagulls to frequent the area and not only can seagulls be a pain when they decide to harass and steal food; they also contaminate our beaches and sea with their poo.
Litter Free Coast & Sea hosted two events along Weymouth seafront during half term, to get the message out to visitors and locals about not feeding the seagulls. Two people in giant seagull costumes visited the seafront and posed for some well-timed, humorous photographs. Their cheeky nature created lots of laughs and helped spread the message and the story was picked up by both The Metro and The London Evening Standard.
This is a great example of a regional PR campaign that has gained national exposure due to its simple and fun photography.
Rinse, recycle, repeat your bathroom empties
Rinse, Recycle, Repeat is a national recycling program in the U.S for beauty and personal care products that motivates the next generation to make an impact on the planet by recycling their empty beauty products.
Garnier, TerraCycle and DoSomething.org launched a ‘Rinse, Recycle, Repeat’ national campaign and college competition with YouTube personality Remi Cruz, with the aim to educate and raise awareness about the next generation to responsibly recycle their beauty empties. The aim is to divert 10 million beauty and personal care empties from landfills by the end of 2017.
National Campaign
People who wanted to participate in the national campaign had to sign up online at DoSomething.org/rinse, decorate a bathroom recycling bin and share a picture with DoSomething.org on the "Prove It" page online or by texting RINSE to 38383 to be entered to be in with the chance of winning a $5,000 scholarship.
Once the bin was filled with 4.5kg of empty bottles, participants could print a free shipping label to send their empties to TerraCycle to be responsibly recycled.
College Competition
As well as the national campaign, on April 1st, a college competition kicked off on 50 college campuses in America to collect the most empty bottles. The college team that collected the most were rewarded with a garden for their community, furnished by Garnier and TerraCycle. The winning college will also receive a $2,000 scholarship to thank them for their commitment to keeping empty beauty bottles out of landfills.
As this campaign is on-going, results are yet to be finalised. To watch the video on how to transform your bathroom, click here.
It’s bananas! How confusing food labels make us throw away perfectly fine food
Confusing food labels may be in for a makeover as The Food Standards Agency, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the not-for-profit Waste & Resources Action Programme are revising the current standards for “best before” type food labelling in an effort to reduce waste across the UK.
To bring attention to the matter, they have compiled a number of tips on how households can reduce their food waste and food bills by smartening up to labels, proper food storage and buying reduced items. The message is strengthened by statistics on how much food we waste in the UK, we were shocked to discover that every day we throw away six million potatoes, three million apples and one million bananas! The campaign also includes an interview with a woman from East Sussex, who explains how she cut her family’s food bill by £500 per year by shopping at stores offering products close to or past their best before-date.
The message behind the campaign is that we need to rethink food labels and reduce waste for the sake of sustainability, but also that doing so is a win-win for everyone; we can use less resources and save some money along the way! It’s a great message as it is one that everyone can get on board with as most of us have found ourselves inspecting our potatoes to see if they are still good, or Googling what on earth “best before” actually means.
This feature was initially spotted in The Mail on Sunday (1,236,839) and has since been picked up online by the Telegraph (146,748,200), The Sun (68,678,330) and the Metro (47,081,468), making it a huge success both on and off line Let’s hope the message gets across and we waste less food as a nation – we’re all being much more careful now after reading it!