Several months ago I was involved in a viral campaign with various folks from the ad industry and it received plenty of media coverage. The campaign was focused on escalating the attention on the government’s negative record on gun control. After the Parkland high school shootings, the team felt motivated to bring into question the new realities of where the country is headed if we are passive about the current gun crisis. The message was to challenge parents of a possible new reality of having our children wearing bulletproof vests in school. I helped develop a website that emulates a company that manufactures children’s vest from kindergarten to high school. The intention was to drive as much traffic from social to this fake store while sending a message. The kicker is when the user clicks on buy now or other buttons, they are prompted to an interface where they can directly tweet a message to their local senator and demand action.
The way I constructed this website was fairly to the point. I had a short time frame and no budget. Time was very crucial because we wanted to launch this while the topic of discussion in the media was still relevant. I only had time to work on this after work and it needed to be done in a few nights. The most time spent was to find the right API for locating your local senator. The Google Civic API had good documentation so I went with that. I made a form where the user inputs their zip code. Then they receive a prompt to a tweet with the included twitter handlers from their local senators, the ready-made message, and the relevant hashtags.
Analytics was important to this project. I pushed for it even though it would cost me more hours of work, at night. It was very important to understand who was engaging on the website from what part of the country, at what time, what they clicked on, how long they spent on each page and so on. It was an opportunity to learn more in-depth Google Analytics and its tag manager. Learning Google tag manager was not a simple process. Initially, I would just insert the Javascript in the footer for each page and call it a night. But this time I wanted to be more ambitious. Even though the process is well documented, there’s still a lot of nooks and crannies to iron out. Navigating the dashboard was cumbersome. Most of the time I would write the tags to my buttons but never got a handshake/response from my dashboard. Eventually, they worked and it was amazing watching them work in real-time. I spent lots of time looking at the instant feedback of clicks and dwell times. After a days-worth of analytics, we made modifications to our site that made a difference in the long run.
Link to site:
Check out my name mentions from AdWeek, AdAge and Fast Company below:
https://adage.com/creativity/work/bulletproof-junior-vests-bulletproof-junior-vests/54177