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#fansofcannes: Missing Type

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This business of creativity is an endless head-scratcher.

One tension that particularly tickles is the balance between business impact and creative satisfaction.

On the one hand, we all want to create ideas that are seen by millions - nay billions - and have a tangible impact to match.

On the other, we can’t help but relish the unsaid ‘smile in the mind’ moment, the blink and you’ll miss it piece of visual wit, which creative minds love to conjure and then spot out in the wild.

But what liberates the latter from navel-gazing narcissism, and the former from unobtainable blue-sky-thinking, is when the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

All of which brings us to Engine’s brilliant Missing Type campaign for NHS Blood and Transplant.

The challenge? A 40% drop in new blood donors over the course of a decade.
The idea? Imagine a world without As, Os and Bs.
The impact? 60,000 new blood donors worldwide by the latest count and the lives of up to 180,000 potentially saved.

The keys to success:

Simplicity
For a moment, our brains plug the gaps as they always do: D_wning Street is still Downing Street.

But then the penny drops. And in an instant the world around us is changed.

Visualising a loss of blood donations by literally removing the letters A, B and O from the alphabet: what a eureka moment.

Scalability
The simplicity of the idea is enormously powerful, but what makes Missing Type dynamite, is the innate ability for engagement and lo-fi scalability it allows.

All Arnie needed in Terminator 2 were “your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle”.

All Missing Type needed was your name and your social media accounts.

And because anyone could take part, it meant that everyone did, with a social media audience of 178 million and over 1,500 brands from Google to Pot Noodle organically getting involved too.

A simple, relatively risk-free act of soft power CSR for them: an exponential boost for the campaign.

Success
It shouldn’t have to be said, but amongst the flotsam and jetsam of great ideas bobbing about in the French Riviera this time of year, Missing Type actually happened in the real world and actually achieved quantifiable, hugely important change.

In our troubled times, the sad truth is that a surge in blood donations is often only inspired by tragedy.

So using proactive positivity to create a spike of 1000% more visitors to the Give Blood website in two days, sign-up 30,000 new donors in ten days and save lives?

That deserves all manner of doffed caps, shiny baubles, and legions of rolled-up sleeves heading down to the nearest donor centre.

_y Christ_pher Sh_rpe, He_d _f _r_nd V_ice, jkr L_nd_n

Missing Type, NHS Blood and Transplant, Engine (Cannes Lions Winner 2016)

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