Awards
2015 IABC Gold Quill Award of Merit – Advertising Campaigns – Resistance Bootcamp
2013 IABC Gold Quill Award of Excellence – Digital Communications Channels – Tales From the Creep Website
2010 IABC Gold Quill Award of Merit – Social Responsibility – Assess the Risk
2009 CPRS Award of Excellence, Silver – Electronic and Interactive Communications – Spot the Hazard
2008 IABC Silver Leaf Award of Excellence – Electronic and Digital Communications – Spot the Hazard
Youth are a priority audience for SAFE Work Manitoba in its social marketing program. SAFE Work Manitoba aims to foster a robust culture of workplace safety and health in Manitoba.
Young workers are at a higher risk of injury due to their inexperience, lack of knowledge and reluctance to ask questions due to a fear of looking ignorant or incompetent.
The SAFE Youth social marketing campaign aims to engage youth aged 16 to 24 in learning about workplace safety. Youth are one of the most highly sought-after audiences for advertisers. SAFE Work competes for young people’s attention in a media marketplace saturated by global consumer brands and slick, tailored entertainment products. Workplace safety and health is not a high priority for youth and a compelling creative hook is needed to gain young people’s attention.
In 2012, we developed the award winning “Spot the Zombie” campaign for SAFE Work Manitoba. The campaign compared zombies to the threat of workplace injury – always lurking and infectious, but beatable through teamwork. In 2013 and 2014, we developed the next phase of the campaign – “Join the Resistance” and “Resistance Bootcamp.” For these campaigns, staff of SAFE Workers of Tomorrow (an organization that educates youth about workplace safety and is funded by SAFE Work Manitoba) played members of “The Resistance,” an organization fighting the zombie threat.
The centrepiece of each campaign is a website where youth could learn about workplace safety. Youth were encouraged to watch interactive webisodes and answer quizzes by the opportunity to enter draws for prizes such as laptops, game consoles and movie tickets. The website drew between 9,000 and 20,000 visitors for each campaign. Our best results, in 2014, were obtained with online pre-roll advertising showing a “recruitment ad” for the Resistance Bootcamp and encouraging youth to visit and play the bootcamp game to enter to win.
Each year, website visitors are surveyed and their safety attitudes and behaviours compared to the general public. The survey consistently find that those who visit the website are more likely to hold safety attitudes (such as believing that workplace injuries are not inevitable) and to practice safe behaviours (such as refusing unsafe work) than the general public.
