When Civil Engineering Firm, McAdams reached out wanting to team up on a bid for the City of Durham’s Stormwater Division, we knew it would be a match made in heaven.
The partnership was born from both organizations doing what they do best. We love any opportunity to put a creative spin on traditional PSAs, but we wanted McAdam’s expertise around environmental matters to guide the meat of the messaging.
The Creative Challenge
The main video of the series served as a creative focal point because of the unique approach to a common topic. To create this, we used three common pain points that the City of Durham wanted to address and personified a character that represented each.
The ideation process included deciding if we wanted to create the characters digitally or practically.
We ultimately decided to create and shoot them practically because we felt it would give us more control over the creative in this particular setting. This isn’t always the case. For example, this piece for Children’s Flight of Hope was the opposite, where we felt that using an entirely CGI environment would give us the most creative freedom.
After deciding that shooting the characters practically for Durham would serve the project best, we went through a few rounds of ideation to determine the best approach for this. After a little back and forth, we settled on an age-old idea: puppets. That’s right. If they worked for Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, why not for our client?
We brought in our resident puppeteer (how many companies can say that) and he got to work creating the characters who would become the piece’s focal point.
The three characters brought to life each pain point, showing residents the importance of bagging their yard waste, disposing of oil and grease properly, and calling the hotline whenever they see loose sediment in their communities.
The Power of Creative Communication
We love actively seeing how creative PSA’s can create real change in communities – like this this Winter Weather Animation for the Town of Hillsborough which reduced their call volume significantly because it answered several common questions.
We’ve all seen PSAs encourage people to take action in some way, but they have been known at time for being only informational…or boring.
Entertaining characters or concepts are proven to make more of an impact since they help the concepts stick in the viewer’s mind. Examples like Smokey the Bear and ‘This is Your Brain on Drugs’ show just how impactful PSAs can be when you think outside of the box or create a recognizable character for the campaign.
Community Impact
The City of Durham does so much already to protect the environment and wants to do more, but needs the eyes and ears of citizens to keep the community’s waterways clean.
They have the infrastructure to combat these common issues but want to make citizens aware of what they can do to help. We’re excited to see the impact these videos have on informing Durham citizens.
A creative approach to government communications helps create positive buzz around important issues and encourages community engagement.
Each character in the main video got an individual cut down to be shown in various places. This series also includes two other informational videos highlighting the state of Durham’s streams and local watershed. The full-length and abbreviated versions are both shown below:
