Yeah. That’s pretty much what we were asked to do.
Post COVID, our longtime partners at City Hall noticed a huge spike in burnout, depression, and other mental health issues in Denverites. To counter this unsettling trend, the City and County of Denver wanted to create a portal with resources to help people in our community with everything from learning about mental health and recognizing symptoms to tips on how to start conversations with others and a list of events around the city that could spread joy.
Our job? To get as many people to that website as possible.
Especially with people of varying cultural backgrounds and levels of comfort surrounding the topic?
And most of all, how the heck do you do it when your only media space is billboards and single-image social ads?
As any good stewards of creativity will tell you, effective billboards typically only say ONE thing. And preferably in less than seven words.
But starting a conversation about mental health and driving folks to a website is not a seven-word task.
So, faced with such a monumental task, of course the natural thing to do was to make it even harder. We decided to boil the message down to a single word per billboard.
A billboard could never deliver the information we needed to in a way that would speak to the diverse population of Denver. Instead, we made it our goal to get our billboards noticed.
And we decided that simplicity was how we were going to achieve that goal.
(Spoiler alert: it worked)
By using bright yellows and other attention-grabbing colors from the City’s color palette, our chosen words — picked for their potential to spark positive feelings and remind folks of what many had lost touch with during the pandemic — dominated their space.
Slightly mysterious subheads helped hold the viewer’s gaze and draw them in, sparking a desire to find out what these billboards were all about.
We were also able to create social posts using our artwork to ensure more ways for people to find the site. Lastly, we worked with our partners to ensure the campaign was accurately translated into other languages, allowing it to connect with as many Denverites as possible.
As soon as the billboards went up, we knew we were likely to succeed — they were simply unmissable.
Over the course of two months, the campaign racked up some impressive stats. And, gratifyingly, received a very high earned media rate, drawing even more attention to the site and raising its potential to spread the good the city intended.
Pageviews from 16.5k Visitors
Impressions Delivered
Clicks
Post engagements