Our project is an advertising campaign to raise awareness that teens get arthritis. It targets peers of these teens so that they can be proactive when confronted with the disease. The campaign is comprised of three parts – all linking to each other. Part one is a stop motion video ad, part two is a physically interactive challenge for the teens to take part in that allows the teen to feel a little of what it would be like to have restricted movement in their joints due to swelling. Lastly, part three is made up of five print ads.

We started off with an idea to raise awareness that young people get arthritis and to inform their peers about the disease and what it’s like for someone living with it. We decided to target 15-18 year olds, as this is the age where bullying can happen towards someone with arthritis if their peers don’t understand what it is. Many health campaigns have a tone of empathy – pulling on the audience’s heartstrings, or use celebrities to get the audiences attention. For our audience we realised that this would not have a great affect on them and that we needed to use either a light hearted, humorous approach or hard impacting messages to get through to them. We also wanted to avoid using celebrities, as this is not really effective as all the audience remembers is the celebrity. More than this we decided to do something with an interactive element where peers could join in and experience the difficulties that come with the disease.

By using principles of advertising narrative, we targeted the audience in a more engaging campaign than the usual empathetic approach that disease awareness has in the media. To achieve this we explored different ways to approach the target audience either through a transmedia or a cross media campaign, using the attention grabbing tone of quirky humour. The aim of this campaign was to induce greater knowledge and a better understanding within the audience towards those with arthritis. Hopefully this will result in increased motivation to raise funds to help find a cure.

The process began with lots of research and personal stories from teens that suffered from arthritis. We then collaborated digital knowledge with advertising knowledge to come up with a digital interactive campaign to stand out from what is already out there. We had to do a lot of exploration with materials until we found the swimming floaties for the interactive part of the campaign.

The campaign is educational and allowed teens to experience the physical frustration of limited movement in their joints. This created a better understanding and empathy towards those trying to cope with the disease.
The value of improving understanding of the disease within peer groups lies in allowing sufferers to feel more at ease when talking about what they are going through instead of bottling it up. This in turn prevents a feeling of isolation for those suffering.