I would like to pose a question. When you see posters for non profit causes like recycling or save environment does that inspire you to make a difference or do you feel utter contempt for the people who put the time to do it. If its latter you are not alone because I used be like that. I would get a kick off making fun of goofy advertised cause and thinking they were totally lame. So as a marketing student how do you make posters for ADHD and do not to suffer the same fate. Well, with the help of my friends Majed Tassan and Saud Saadoun, I was able to come up with my first marketing campaign about ADHD in my university. We worked with the ADHD Support Group who provided us information with ADHD as well as information about celebrities with ADHD. At the preliminary stages, we came up with having a series of posters that would start out with a ambigious idea and then it would finally reveal a concerete image that would represent ADHD. Instead we thought of using Geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Michael Jordan, Will Smith and Walt Disney to represent what is postive of ADHD such as creativity. We took the earlier series of posters idea in that each poster of genius would appear between two days of each other. Each one of the poster would contain a highlited letter such as A for Albert Einstein and all the posters together would spell out ADHD as you can see below.
These beautiful posters were designed by Saud Saadoun and as you can see in bottom left corner that is logo of the ADHD Support Group & Society in Saudi Arabia. There was some excitment about putting these posters around and no one knowing who was putting these posters. It created anticipation for the campaign, as people were wondering what was the meaning of the posters and who was spreading them.
It was hard for me not to laugh while I saw people discussing it in classrooms unaware that my friends & I were the ones doing it. We put the posters everywhere even a Michael Jordan Posters on a high basketball hoop in the gym and till now it hasn’t been taken down!
Although people became aware of ADHD, we did a blunder in overestimating our audience. People only knew that Geniuses had ADHD when it was spelt out to them but didn’t understand that putting the highlighted letter in all posters together spelled out ADHD. So I would say that the campaign may been too smart for its own good but it was still successful. Tommorrow I will talk about T-shirt designs we did as well as events we held for AHDD in our University at the end of campaign.