Thinking Like The Young

I went to the She Says Golden Stiletto Awards a couple of weeks ago. Most of the entries weren’t very inspiring, but thankfully the winning entry was quite interesting. It was a campaign by Lean Mean Fighting Machine for the Department of Schools, Children and Families. The idea was to encourage 13-14 year olds to study foreign languages in the 6-month run-up to their GCSE choices without sounding preachy. LMFM based their campaign on a phenomenon they observed in Flickr where teenagers take photographs of their rooms and tag the contents. They created 3 foreign teenagers’ rooms, which were decorated according to their different interests. The objects in their rooms were tagged in their respective native languages and linked to external blogs or videos in those languages. 

I’m increasingly tiring of microsites and am relieved this uses an existing service (Flickr) to speak to its audience. I was also quite impressed with the insight behind it all.