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Creative Venturethree EU Referendum

Britain Stronger in Europe is expecting people to poke fun at youth campaign

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By Natalie Mortimer | N/A

May 25, 2016 | 4 min read

Britain Stronger in Europe is encouraging young people to vote in the EU Referendum in a new campaign that has been designed knowing that youths will probably “take the piss out of it”.

vote in

Why Stronger In Europe Wants People To Poke Fun At Its New Campaign

The #votin campaign uses deliberate spelling mistakes such as ‘Tourin’, ‘Chillin’ and ‘Meetin’ to both reflect the way that many youths seeminlgy drop their ‘g’s’ when speaking and also to play on the theme of Vote In.

Britain Stronger in Europe approached brand consultancy Venturethree to create the campaign and briefed the agency to reach young people who might find out too late that they care about being in the EU.

Speaking to The Drum, Venturethree founder Michael Zur-Szpiro said that the creative approach was “to say in one word what others may need 200 words for”.

“Don’t worry about the data and statistics because firstly, someone else is communicating them, secondly, no one knows if they are true or not and thirdly, this is going to happen on an emotional level as well as a rational level so find a way of engaging people’s hearts as well as their minds.

“Another substantive point is that if you don’t vote generation Europe, someone else will vote instead of you because the older more anti-Europe, more xenophobic generation will be out using their voice, so if you want a voice, and if you want to influence your future, which is going to stretch far longer than the older people’s future then come out and vote and remember that you need to register by 7 June.”

The campaign creative uses short, strong headlines on a mixture of backgrounds such as images of young people enjoying the benefits of being in the EU as well as solid colours in black, red and white. A film has also been created – mostly using Instagram images of those working at Venturethree - and will run across social media.

Explaining why it was right to create a campaign knowing that people might poke fun at it, Venturethree copywriter TJ Rees said: “We are sure that when this ad goes out people will take the piss out of it, it had to be that way rather than this race to vanilla that seems to be the way that a lot of these communications are going.”

votein

It is a thought echoed by Scott Townsin, a designer at Venturethree who said that the headlines on the campaign posters have been created to “start the conversation”.

“A big bold headline gets people engaged, I look at that and think oh a spelling mistake, I’m going to read that. It’s almost like you don’t need to say that much because the hashtag will have all the information that you need and it just starts the conversation. Even if people are annoyed about it, because I can imagine people saying, ‘oh David Cameron is trying to be young,’ but I think that is a good thing because that’s a conversation that wasn’t happening before.”

The campaign has its work cut out in the social media space given that twice as many Twitter users were using the official leave hashtags for the EU referendum campaign: #VoteLeave; and #LeaveEU, compared to the official ‘Remain’ hashtags #StrongerIn and #UKinEU according to a study of over 350,000 tweets sent between March and May by Jellyfish.

Voters have until 7 June to register before the referendum itself takes place on 23 June.

Creative Venturethree EU Referendum

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