Viper Adventure

Free Access to National Parks and AONBs Next Weekend!

Author: Jim Hardcastle

Jim helps people plan and deliver effective communications. His background in the countryside sector provide him with a wealth of experience in rural marketing. Facilitation, fueled by coffee, with Post-Its at the ready, he’s here to help .

Free access to National Parks and AONBs next weekend! Yes, that’s right. Discover your nation’s great countryside for free. Britain's best bits, free on a plate. All entry costs will be waived. Gateway locations to these most beautiful natural areas will be free to pass!

Seriously, we all know access to our National Parks and AONBs is free. This is an example of a campaign headline. You can imagine all the other marketing material around it: images of rosy cheeked rangers waving people in, happy families striding across the moors with a picnic, welcome banners suspended over roads.

But we both know this campaign idea will go deeper into people’s minds. It challenges existing thinking for those that know they’re free and for those that don’t know they’re free what a great way to get people’s attention?

It raises questions about what we mean by free? National Park Authorities and AONB teams don’t come for free. Agricultural subsidies have paid for that view. What is our tourism impact and should visitor’s ‘payback’?

The campaign is a springboard. The intellectual discussions dive deep. That is some rich content there, allowing you to introduce new concepts and create new conversations with people.

People’s emotions will be teased. Some will laugh. Some will groan. Some will turn up looking for physical gates left abandoned by rangers. Campaigns provoke reactions. They make people talk. In turn these people will go and talk to others. Isn’t that a viral campaign but without the pixels? Another brochure will not do this.

But, now that you have people’s attention what do you do with it? Your aim is to change behaviour. This is the beauty of a campaign, it will have a defined beginning, middle and end. You’ll be able to see how the world is different afterwards.

The result may be a 1000 new contacts on your email database, 500 new Twitter followers or 100 new Likes. Please don’t record column inches, that’s not a metric, it’s a delivery tool for your campaign and not an end result. Even the phrase ‘column inches’ is old fashioned.

The social media links demonstrate measurable retention (or not) of your contacts. You can engage them in other conversations now you’ve got their attention. You need to get that attention in the first place.

What provocative campaigns are you going to use to get people’s attention this year?
 

- Posted on Thursday 12 Jan 2012 at 17:14 by Jim Hardcastle

Tags: aonbs (7), campaign (5), national parks (4)