Liverpool City Council took the brave step of tackling drunkenness in their city by launching a 5-week pilot scheme that involved around 25 supporting bars refusing to serve, and even refusing entry to people who are too drunk. Breathalysers were also used to test if people were too drunk to serve.
With such an initative, clear communication is obviously needed and that’s why we created an advertising campaign that could quickly get the message out in a way that the public would understand and engage with; creating a striking series of posters that would be supported through social media and a website.
The creative combines hard-hitting photography with light-hearted parodies of the labels you find on alcoholic drinks. The juxtaposition of these two elements helps us deliver a strong message that people can relate to.
Each execution personifies the negative problems of drunken behaviour, which are only made worse by bars serving people who are already drunk. These problems and characteristics are all embodied by our characters; the sorts of characters that we’ve all bumped into on a night out… unfortunately.
Nobody wants to be like these people and many of our audience will have suffered as a result of people like this. This offers people a new perspective and invites them to think more about the good that the campaign is doing, instead of simply dismissing it out of hand.
This was then supported via social media. We approached our social media plan differently than we have for other clients, we predicted that a large section of our target market will not take kindly to being told when they can or can’t drink and would therefore be unlikely to follow ‘saynotodrunks’ on Facebook or Twitter. We overcame this problem by launching ‘toomanybevvies’ on Facebook and Twitter two weeks before the start of the campaign. We did this to amass likes/followers in our target market by posting relevant, engaging content, a tactic that got us a good amount of followers. We then changed the name of the page and launched the campaign with a ready-made social media presence.
This scheme was supported by Citysafe and Merseyside Police.