AIDS lottery idea - old portfolio

dabitch — Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 02:09

A long time ago I hatched an idea and approached the Body Shop with it. It was about AIDS and designed so that it would reflect the true numbers of each country the bottles of Body Shop Goo would be sold in. It would be 1in 25 if they were destined for Body Shops in the Bay area, for example. Pretty scary odds right?

The effect would be more so, imagine picking up a bottle of whatever and discovering later that the bottle you choose carried that message. The mental jump to "what if I had the wrong date...." isn't that far off, the bottle shakes peoples "it won't happen to me" misconceptions right at the core. It could happen to you. Prevent it! The Body Shop - actually Anitra Roddricks PA at the time - turned the idea down saying they had already done similar ideas with the "speak out against animal testing lip balm". I still don't see the similarities.

The idea still nagged at me as I think it's important to really make people understand that they need to protect themselves, I took it to my boss at Publicis, Amsterdam many years later, the message glued to a Coke can. Exited about the worldwide impact of Coke pulling such a stunt off he got on the horn immediately, and many meetings with Coke Netherlands and Aids organizations (who's number we'd stick on the label for more info) followed as we devised a plan of attack to get the entire Coke corp to march to the same tune. At one meeting they were concerned that now that Netherlands and Belgium had said yes, the next available level - Coke Europe - might say no and then it would all die. We wanted to contact Douglas Daft at Coke directly. Soon afterwords, my boss left Publicis, and so did Coke and eventually so did I, in that order.
Again, the idea died on the foam core. But it still nagged at me to be done.

The Idea as it appeared in 2002 in Ghost magazine (a mag of dead ads).
But it didn't die yet!

On December 1st 2004 with the help of viewropa members we created a banner that would work worldwide. It was announced here - where anybody with a website could use the code on their pages and display the ad. The banner, designed by Taz and the clever code whipped up by Ivan will hopefully appear on as many web pages as possible December 1 2004.