Anti-Drugs Campaign

Final Piece

As you can see, the anti-drugs campaign poster is an incredible success.  Unfortunately, this campaign poster was not our first idea. My team (Patrikas and Guilherme) and I wanted to do an environmental campaign at first. We wanted to inform an audience about the pollution of the River Soar and convey a message that we should keep the river clean or else we would ruin the ecosystem of the swans. When we went down to the river channel next to LIDL to take some professional photographs with better angles of the polluted river channel by surprise we met a cleaned up river channel. Therefore our campaign poster could not work, we had a brilliant idea but no evidence of the pollution.

The river channel before on the left, the river channel after on the right.

Because of this disadvantage of the environmental campaign, my team and I decided to go with our 'plan B' idea for our campaign which was an Anti- drug campaign. Our reason to why we decided to make an Anti-drug campaign is because there are lots of young people getting under the influence of drugs. From our experience we have come across many young people who are dealing with drugs on frequent basis, therefore we know know it is a big issue that should be taken care of. Especially, in may case I lost a friend the beginning of this year due to the overdose of drugs. With all these aspects considered, my team and I wanted to make a powerful anti-drugs campaign.

Recently, a famous rapper named Mac Miller passed away due to drug overdose. He was just 26 years of age, he had so much more life to live through but he fell under the influence of drugs. My team members and I thought it would he would be a good example to show proof what drugs can do to a person which is dying young. Before using Mac Millers face for our campaign we decided to some market research to see whether a majority of the young adults audience knew who he was.

Market Research

Our team placed a photo of Mac Millers on to the board without his name. Then we asked our classmates to raise their hands up if they knew who this artist/rapper was and the majority raised their hands up. With this research my team and I knew that using him for our campaign poster was going to work out great. After our research, we started to brainstorm ideas for how to represent Mac Miller. Since he was dead we were brainstorming ideas on how to represent that on our campaign poster to imply a message that this what will happen with the use of drugs. We came up with idea to photoshop a half of a skull onto a side of his face.

Mac Miller: the photo we used for our campaign poster
Source: http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/mac-miller-profile.html

 

The Skull: we used the right side of the skull to photoshop it into Mac Miller's face
Source: https://boneclones.com/product/human-male-european-skull-BC-107

With these two images presented above we formed our image for our campaign poster.

After Patrikas photoshopped Mac Miller's face with a photoshop app called pixelmator we did some research on different anti-drugs tag-lines to get some ideas so that we could we could create our own.

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This was the site that we used to get some ideas for our tagline.

Source: https://brandongaille.com/61-catchy-just-say-no-to-drugs-slogans/

After our research, we came up with our own initial tagline idea "Don't take drugs, Don't die young." However, after some deep thought about our initial tagline idea we realised it was not a powerful one. We needed a powerful, shorter, powerful tagline. Because of this, we thought of reverse psychology.

"Reverse psychology is more likely to be successful with people who have a high need for control. Rebellious teenagers who naturally do the opposite of what their parents say are classic targets, as are Type A people and those with narcissistic or even psychopathic tendencies"- changingminds.org. As a result of usually telling young adults not to do something and they would always do the opposite, we decided to come up with a tagline that tells them to do drugs. Our final idea for our tagline became "Take drugs, Die young." Research for a powerful quote by Mac Miller that relates to our poster idea Source: https://wealthygorilla.com/15-inspirational-mac-miller-quotes-from-his-lyrics/ To make our campaign poster even more striking we decided to add one of his quotes. We did research through the web browser for quotes that relate to the fact that he did not want to die young. The quote we decided was strong  and ended up adding to our campaign poster was, "Never scared of death, but I ain't ready for that day to come." The reason we chose the bold colours orange and yellow for the text was for the words to stand out. We used a slightly darker shade of orange for the tagline so that it would give sort of a warning message. In conclusion, I think my team and I did our best to present this poster in a powerful way. I like the fact we had a good thought process throughout the whole project, we all shared and combined our ideas to form this poster. Patrikas was in charge mostly in the photoshop part of the project and Guilherme and I were mostly the ones doing the researching and coming with tagline and the searching for a powerful quote.