Cracking Up Over Fireworks Campaign

Written by Eelke Mol on December 12th, 2009 | 1 comment

The Dutch organisation of consumer safety, Consument en Veiligheid, has launched a campaign called ‘Shit Happens’ to inform people about the dangers of fireworks. This is something they do every year, and every year they try to be as original as possible.

This campaign is original indeed: apart from what happens to the victim, the creators have decided to put the focus on bystanders and not on the people lighting fireworks themselves.

On the dedicated website you can watch the video and send it to your friends, embed it on your website or share it via various social networks. The fun thing is that the video can be made personal by inserting a photo and a comment that you can let the victim say.
Haven’t we seen something like this before? Well, there is of course Stanislav, the campaign that made use of personal profile info on Hyves to inform people about privacy on the net. Also, Agis Zorgverzekeringen, a health insurance company, created a personalized video for Hyves about the what can happen when having too much to drink on a night out. So how original is the content of this campaign really?
The success of the Stanislav campaign isn’t a guarantee for the success of the Agis or Shit Happens. Even though the initiators of the campaigns are different companies, the content of the videos is very similar. This makes it hard to believe that Agis or Shit Happens will rise as high as Stanislav.
On the other hand, the Shit Happens videos has a great viral potential because it’s almost no effort to pass it on. The video can be placed on different social sites. Stanislav was only available on Hyves, like Agis, so in theory this video could reach even more people because the material is not limited by a certain network.
Looking at content, it has gone downhill since Stanislav. All three videos are obviously a bit absurd but Agis and Shit Happens take it a bit further, up to a point where some people might even find it stupid. In comparison, Stanislav was probably the most realistic regarding the dangers portrayed.
With Shit Happens, Consument en Veiligheid wants to inform youth of under 20 years about firework safety. But is that really possible with this campaign?

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