New viral video campaign for Apartheid Museum by TBWA

by Fred Roed on 15/04/10 at 5:00 am
6 comments

I saw these videos today for the first time and I’m now making plans to go see the Apartheid Museum. It’s not often nowadays that a marketing message actually spurs you into action, but this one did.

Like the best campaigns, this campaign contains a simple, yet hard-hitting concept – in this case a series of questions underlining the challenge that all South Africans face.

Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor, Nobel Laureate and author, said his biggest mission in life is to sensitize the desenitized. He means to fight against the apathy that we face daily; the attitude of “it’ll never happen to us” or “it won’t happen again”. Never more so than now has this message been relevant in South Africa.

Ask yourself: “Who wrote the book Let My People Go?” – if you don’t know the answer, truck yourself over to the Apartheid Museum asap.

Watch these clips:

TBWA writes the following about the campaign: A mere sixteen years after the fall of Apartheid, our history and the lessons it can teach us were being systematically forgotten. So we decided to expose the reality. And start a conversation. After all, the most important step in addressing a problem is knowing that there is one.

So we took to the streets and interviewed our youth directly. We simply asked them to identify a series of famous people. First popular culture icons and lastly a famous anti-apartheid leader.

Our suspicion turned to reality. Over 86% of the people interviewed easily recognised the popular figures and failed to identify the South African anti-apartheid leader.

What is the consequence of this ignorance? A history forgotten is a future lost.

Well done to the TBWA team on some great work.

Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.

6 Responses to “New viral video campaign for Apartheid Museum by TBWA”

Mike Saunders

Apr 15th, 2010

I love this! its obvious that I would considering my last article but this is a great concept with excellent execution.

Nicely done TBWA!!
Kevin Cochrane

Apr 15th, 2010

Yoh. This is brilliant! I’ve always agreed that we are losing our past and it is slowly starting to repeat itself. Well done guys. Great work.
Mathebula

Apr 16th, 2010

this is a grate idea i agree, i have never been to apartheid museum
but now I’m making plans to go with my younger brothers

nice work guys TBWA
Katleho Mofolo

Apr 16th, 2010

Awesome concept.

I think ignorance is deteriorating amongst the majority of the youth. I believe one of the reasons for this is the habit of not reading on a regular and getting yourself informed, the original codex is not utilised anymore and if this continues to be a norm, fads will continue to develop into empty and permanent new culture or sub-culture.

I think reading and education are rudimentary essentials to feed and safe guard ones’ consciousness and awareness.

Excellent work!
Fred

Apr 16th, 2010

Readers – please post your comments once you’ve been to the museum – we’d love to hear from you.

TBWA have scored a winner here. Looking forward to seeing the results.
Derek

Apr 17th, 2010

Nice idea, contrived execution.

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