Plan It Day's winning ideas: How Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Amnesty International and more will try to change the world in one day

Then it was over to the brands to choose their winners, which we detail below. These are the creative ideas which we will now be attempting to put into action for real in only 24 hours at Do It Day on 10 November.

xAd

In cities, all over the world homeless people starve, while businesses throw away tonnes of food that in many cases is still edible. Such a dire situation invoked similar responses from the two challenge teams, with one focusing on the distribution logistics and the second on the marketing efforts, which it was decided would be combined to create a stronger overarching solution.

Daniel Warner, supply and data director at xAd, highlighted Team One's logistical understanding of the problem and how to solve it, especially by incorporating the issue of delivering warm food, while also admitted how Team Two had envisaged a digital map of London called The Great British Food Bank.

Despite the strength of both ideas, it was Team One that shone the brightest to xAd.

"What they really nailed was the understanding of what bits the technology allows to be automated," explained Warner. "Instead of getting too bogged down in the details of what that looks like, they have really focused on the transportation of food and who we would need to partner with, what does that partnership look like and the logistics behind introducing thing around distance and commuter time and saving fuel costs."

He continued: "For me, the reason why they won is because they nailed pay point of the challenge. The technology swept in and, as complex as it is, almost made that easy. The hard bit is what do the logistics look like and they have nailed it with their ideas."

The two teams will subsequently work together to realise their ideas. Those were:

Team One: Alexandra Matthews, xAd, Melissa Srickland, Bing Ads, Eleanor Worman, Clear Channel, Borja Escriva, Krow.

Team Two: David Cardona, Krow, Elle Edwards - Scott, igital Consultant, Susan Robinson – xAd, Rob Arnott, The Drum.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola wants to roll out an initiative to help combat Britain’s litter problem, so on Plan It Day, the drinks giant called on creatives to develop a campaign that will encourage people to litter less and recycle more. Part of the winning execution will be implemented during the 24-hour challenge on Do it Day, while the full strategy is set to launch in Scotland in 2017.

The winning idea will see special bins placed around Glasgow city centre with trained cameras focused on them as part of a live broadcast, which will be streamed on its own microsite. Tapping into both the ‘slow tv’ real-time video trends which helped seemingly insignificant happenings like Drummond Puddle Watch gain mass viral popularity, the push will also run across social channels and could also appear as ad break takeover on TV.

The bin ‘character’ at the heart of the initiative will be run as a social media personality, and to keep viewers amused and intrigued it will ‘perform’ live Trigger Happy TV-style pranks randomly; like standing up and following litterbugs or sticking a hand out of the bin to high-five conscientious pedestrians. Additional expansions could also see digital posters beside the bins that show live footage of people using them overlayed with text depicting phrases used to rationalise dumping trash like ‘nobody saw me’.

Winnng team: Alexei Awan, art director, Rapp; Ashley McPherson, producer, STV Creative; Jessica Davis, editorial account executive, The Drum Network; Natasha Freedman, senior copywriter, OgilvyOne.

O2, Greengrass and Bing

O2, Greengrass and Bing Ads asked creatives to come up with a way to tackle gender inequality in the work place, focusing directly on men.

During Plan It Day, both teams discussed a number of ideas with one drawing inspiration from the Haribo ad that used adults with children’s voices for a wider campaign that would also encourage people to share pictures of their feet on social media. On the flipside, team two went for an online-only approach that would ask men to pledge their support for women using online and print ads to advertise the idea.

However, it was the simplicity of taking your socks and shoes off and sharing an image tagged #WalkTheTalk from team one that caught the attention of the organisations and thus winning the pitch to take the idea to Do It Day.

Winning team: Ayesha Salim, The Drum Works; Laura Hawksfield, senior PR manager, O2; Matt Bradford, PR manager, O2; Adrian Cutler, Microsoft, Bing Ads; Ian Smith, senior analyst, Rapp; Fanky Farmer, strategy director, Universal McCann.

ClientEarth

ClientEarth is charity of activist lawyers legislating cleaner cities across the globe. In London specifically it wants to cut out around 10,000 early deaths caused by air pollution each year - according to a study from the Royal College of Physicians.

To achieve this two teams were tasked with using their creative power to generate a visually creative campaign informing the 8.7m people who call London home of ClientEarth’s work.

Team one edged a victory, pitching the #LondonAir campaign. Integrating with CityMapper to visualise London’s pollution and suggest alternative routes with cleaner air. Instead of counting calories burned during the walk, users would be informed of pollutants avoided. This would be supplemented by an art installation of 100 balloons across the city pinpointed by CityMapper which initiates the social media segment of the campaign whereupon Londoners are encouraged to share images with the balloons to raise awareness of the briefs.

Winning teams: Zohra Khan, NMPi, Ben Harwood, Feed, Paris Vrettakos, UM London, and Caroline Watson, Global Action Plan.

Amnesty International

Amnesty International turned to Do It Day with a huge brief asking creatives to change the perception of refugees in countries where the dominant discourse remains one of ‘fear and xenophobia’. Hassan Khan, the charity’s global brand partnerships, campaigns and communications international secretariat, advised teams to avoid ideas filled with doom and gloom and instead focus on the positives refugees could bring to their new home countries.

Targeting 18-34 year-olds in countries like the UK, US, Australia and across the EU, the two teams immediately set about creating ideas to humanise the masses of people displaced by war and conflict with ideas including Tinder-style apps to match people with refugees, Airbnb-inspired hosting programmes, ‘digital shoebox’ welcome packs and Ice Bucket Challenge-like creative ideas designed to go viral.

The winning team’s idea, #KnowOnePerson, focused on reframing refugees as “just like us” with a campaign matching people with a refugee who shares their birthday because “100 per cent of people have a birthday, and 100 per cent of people share their birthday with someone else”.

#KnowOnePerson will now progress to Do It Day on Thursday 10 November when people from all over the world will be invited to share their date of birth with Amnesty to be matched with a refugee, receiving their picture and a short bio along with a link you can share with friends and family so they can get to #KnowOnePerson too.

Winning team: Viktoriya Ulasavets, account coordinator, Bing Ads EMEA; Emily Clayfield, SEO consultant, Builtvisible; Jo Jephcott, creative, Kitcatt Nohr; Mike Hollingbery, chief executive officer, Bozboz; Emma Rookledge, head of TV, Krow; Alistair Duncan, chief strategy officer, Splash WW.

Eating Better Alliance

Eating Better Alliance want to encourage men to eat less meat, to better their health and the health of the planet. Eating meat has been perceived as being masculine for years, with advertising and marketing campaigns contributing to 6 out of 10 men exceeding the government intake of red and processed meat per week, as opposed to only 1 in 4 women. In 2015, Pepperami released research that claimed that men would rather give up sex, Sky Sports and their jobs, than give up meat. Eating Better posed a meaty challenge; how can we encourage men to eat less meat?

The winning idea turned what could be a nagging campaign about eating less meat into a fun message to chow down more vegetables, under the banner: “Are you Vegcurious?” It will be brought to life through social activation campaigns encouraging men to share their #vegcurious meals on social platforms, with the potential for celebrity chef endorsements, restaurant and brand interaction via the #vegcurious hashtag, with the potential for physical popups in stations, public places and supermarkets. The campaign will culminate in the Vegcurious Awards intended to appeal to many brands men are loyal to.

Daniel Vennard, from the World Resources Institute which is working alongside Eating Better, said: “The idea disrupted the usual narrative, turning the serious to humour, from guilt to enablement, providing a very engaging and motivating campaign that will have an excellent legacy factor.”

Winning team: Marc Young, Dennis Publishing; Chris Aming, founder, Creative Semiotics; Ben Hawley, director, Theobald Fox; Christopher Onderstall, Fleishman; Inga Driksne, head of client relations, Duel

Airbnb

For a brand that had one of the more straightforward challenges (on paper at least), Airbnb’s groups were faced with balancing ambition with pragmatism more readily than some of the others. Tasked with coming up with a “toolkit” hosts could use to transform their local neighbourhoods into tourist hotspots, both teams toiled with how far they could push a brief, that Airbnb has said if good enough could form a permanent part of its marketing mix.

After discussion, planning and pitching it came down to two ideas Airbnb’s brand marketer Jeanne Salvanès had to pick between. However, this was easier said than done given both teams had gone to great lengths to ensure their ideas empowered hosts to champion their own neighbourhoods but also focused on a social, local and mobile activation, as advised during a brief that lasted a lot longer than some of the others. Such was the scope of the challenge that Salvanès and her colleagues were peppered with questions from both sides, each searching for a killer insight that could give them a competitive edge.

Having those insights aided both teams as they attempted to work out how to motivate hosts to help their communities rather than just wait for guests to come to them. It makes the fact that team one could come up with a winning idea even more impressive. Pitched as a ‘trusted local guide for guests, created by hosts,’ the ‘Local Gems’ app won over Airbnb on the day. All content on the app is powered by the community, with the idea being that hosts are recommending places in their local area to convince guests to spend more there.

Of the winning idea, Salvanès said it was a “hyper-local, community-driven and scaleable guidebook that could eventually drive footfall to local businesses and local communities.”

Winning team: Samantha Hibbard-Daniels, account director at Kitcatt Nohr, Becky Stuart, insight and planning manager at Ear to the Ground, Alistair Tweedie, senior digital designer at The Drum, Lauren Holden, project consultant at Reading Room, Millie-Mae Twort, account manager at Rapp.

IBM

Thousands of people go missing every year in the UK, the majority of them 18-25 year-olds. And the first 24 hours in any missing person case are critical, the chances of a positive outcome after this time diminishing significantly.

It is with this in mind that IBM has created an app using cognitive technology to help UK police forces gain access to and analyse all relevant data – including historical cases, transport routes and even weather – with which to plan effective search campaigns within this 24 hours.

Police forces already have access to most of this information, but it is usually held in separate databases and in some cases by different organisations, meaning analysing it quickly and drawing insights from it can be difficult.

And so IBM challenged the teams at Plan It Day to think up ways in which it could improve the usability this app, as well as plan a campaign to drive adoption of it by police forces.

The two teams working on the challenge decided early on to come together and tackle the brief as one and before long Post-It notes scrawled with a multitude of questions, insights and ideas completely covered a nearby wall, ranging from an Amber Alert targeted at specific locations as determined by IBM Watson cognitive technology to gamifying the search process to redefining global standard for finding people from 24 hours to 12.

But the winning idea, as chosen by IBM’s Julia Glencross and which will be put into action on Do It Day, is a campaign called ‘Spotlight’ which will make use of location-specific digital out-of-home and social media to target and amplify missing person information for regional police forces.

The idea will utilise digital and physical media to raise awareness of the multiple benefits of the app to the target audience and, importantly, will aim to increase the success of finding 18-25 year-olds in the first 24 hours of them going missing by 50 per cent by 2017.

Winning team: Richard Coope, digital director, Radley Yeldar; Annabel Conn, event executive, The Drum; Konrad Jarosinki, web developer, The Drum; Laura Brady, communications planning manager, MEC; Martina Ciampolini, senior account manager, Rapp; Gary King, senior planner/buyer, Rapp; Jane Hales, managing partner, Sapio Research; Steve Lloyd, creative director, ICO Design.

Dennis Publishing

Dennis Publishing challenged the industry to plant 10,000 trees in 24 hours as part of its #treesfortrees campaign in 2015, to put the charitable Heart of England Forest on the public radar and overcome the obstacle that according to the NCVO, environmental charities rank 12th in public donations.

The charity was founded by the publisher’s founder Felix Dennis, a strong advocate of combating deforestation in the UK. This year Dennis challenged teams to take the brief one step further, utilising the existing #treesfortrees tag for a bigger cause to establish longevity in the campaign.

This year Dennis will plant 15,000 trees in one day in January, and use Do It Day as a platform to activate a powerful marketing campaign.

The winning Plan It Day pitch focuses on leveraging the existing assets to drive higher social engagement, since Dennis failed to reach its virtual submission target last year. The pitch, ‘Hug a Tree: Name our Forest’, brings a call-to-action to the fore. The idea centres around the premise that it is hard to get people to engage with a cause they don’t care about, so there has to be an incentive.

The public will be encouraged to submit a picture of themselves hugging a tree, and share it via social with their suggestion of the name of the forest that will be planted. Judges commended the “transactional” nature of the campaign, since each person is in with a chance of winning, incentivising them to take part. The ambition is to reach 15,000 uses of the hashtag on Do It Day, to match the 15,000 trees that will be planted on newly dubbed Plant It Day in January. All agreed social would be the crux of the campaign “because it can go global”.

Winning team: Florence de Caires, Tapestry; ReeRee Rockette, the tree; Toba Shahab, Clear Channel, Emma Mercer, Events Executive, The Drum.

Runner up: Phil Mitchelson, marketing and planning director, Big Balls; Aileen Rushton, STV; Daniel Morris, The Drum; Carine Lombard, The Drum.

Digital Futures

Responding to Digital Futures’ challenge of finding a way to place 100 young adults who are not in employment, education or training into a digital work placement or apprenticeship in a day, the winning team created a social media-led campaign based around the hashtag #meetyourfuture.

On this hashtag, young people aged 18-24 will be encouraged to share their work in the hope of catching the eye of the industry’s top creative agencies. Hero profiles of apprentices who are part of Digital Futures’ education programme will also be shared on the hashtag to show potential employers the talent available to help them plug the digital skills gap.

The headline elements of the campaign include a video showing how ambassadors, who could for instance include music entrepreneur Jamal Edwards, MediaCom’s Allan Rich and Sir Alan Sugar, have enjoyed success without following the traditional educational path.

At Do It Day, the team will take a double decker bus branded with #meetyourfuture on a tour of London creative agencies. The bus will be populated by keen apprentices and the agencies will be encouraged to literally come downstairs and meet their future.

Winning team: Angus Macdonald, Inspiral; Jonny Hornby, D&AD Newblood; David Felton, Oh La La Creative; Ibbi Onasanya, RAPP; Jessica Arnold, Dennis Publishing.

DixonsCarphone

Tasked with creating a marketing campaign to promote information sharing between the UK and South Africa via using a film-short and an accompanying marketing campaign, Dixons Carphone, along with challenge partners BluPoint and experiential outfit Undercurrent handed creatives what was arguably the most logistically challenging one.

After a period of intense debate, the three challenge partners elected to merge the two ideas; Team One’s idea was to ‘spread the power of knowledge to Africa’ via the medium of a split-screen media movie contrasting the ease of internet access (ergo knowledge) children in developed markets have. This will then be compared to some of the hardships faced by those in Africa (and how this is leading to some human rights violations). A key area of focus will be the children on both sides of the narratives earning ‘gold stars’ for knowledge-sharing.

This narrative will be filmed, with the marketing element of the winning idea(s) taken from Team 2’s contribution, which centred on distribution via social channels, as well as out-of-home executions, using the tag #AfriCAN, with a post-campaign execution to include the tag #AfriCannect

A team will fly out to South Africa on 23 October to shoot the first half of the content, with the remainder of the execution to take place on Do it Day.

Team One: Abdul Ahad, Dennis Publishing, Joe Durr, Ravensbourne University, Alexandra Warinfg RAPP, Paul Gidley, STV, business director.

Team Two: Katie Cook, MEC Global, Nick Creed, The Drum, Dominic Basiten, Digital Futures, Rosie Milton, Lewis Communications.

NSPCC

The NSPCC has chosen to back a #KidsWithGrownUpProblems campaign after two teams battled it out for their ideas to be taken forward to Do It Day.

The winning idea drew on the insight that the problems we face as adults aren’t that different to those issues children call ChildLine to talk about, such as stress, anxiety and body confidence. The underlying message was that children have far fewer outlets to talk about these issues than adults do, which is why ChildLine is so important.

The team now wants to plan a fully integrated campaign under the banner #KidsWithGrownUpProblems, which will encompass both traditional media, including TV and print, as well as digital channels to target adults with this message.

In an ambitious twist, the team also wants to orchestrate a PR stunt on Do It Day itself potentially involving Wayne Rooney, should the footballer agree. They also plan to get ChildLine’s volunteers to host counselling sessions for adults to talk about their problems.

“We felt they drew out some really interesting and unexpected insight that shaped a new idea that we believe could deliver something tangible on Do it Day and with the potential to develop it into more over time,” said Mike McGrath, head of ChildLine 30 campaign at the NSPCC.

Winning team: Daryl Frost, international planning director at VCCP; Paula Lock, account director at digital agency Feed; Victonia Alison, production lead at STV Creative; and Lea Senn from Ravensbourne college.

Business in the Community

At The Drum’s Plan it Day event, Business in the Community asked a team of marketers to rally together businesses across the UK to turnaround the decline of the high street and ultimately increase footfall, turn around empty premises and create jobs.

Team one put forward the concept of 'The High Street High School' where the big name brands on the high street would pass on their experience and expertise in a classroom environment with practical lessons such as ‘maths' being used to inform other smaller businesses of the kind of financial and numerical practices which have allowed them to be as successful as they are. Other typical school subjects such as 'history' and 'social studies' would provide a comprehensive roundup of the plethora of hurdles which all business face and in turn would see high street brands working together to maximise their potential.

The second team took on a more radical approach where BITC would stage the spoof death of a high street complete with closure signs, social media campaigns using the hashtag #SaveOurHighStreet and local media coverage. The idea was to raise awareness of the possibility of such a troubling possibility if businesses failed to come together for the greater good.

After hearing both plans, BITC’s enterprise and culture director, Jane Pritchard, concluded that BITC could not afford to pass on either. The High Street High School plan will be put into practice on Do it Day while the closure idea will be attempted later.

Team one: Laetitia Rennie, director of commercials and branded content at ITN Productions; Kim Wills, KJW; Simon Harwood, RAPP; Kerry Meakins, The Drum.

Team two: Andrew O'Sullivan, OgilvyOne Business; Chris Storey, Financial Times; David Pool, Space and Time Media; Laura Chacksfield, Space and Time Media; Nicholas Berneen, Ravensbourne; Gavin Floyd, The Drum.