Marketing

Student responsible drinking videos reach 500k people

Student-led campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of responsible drinking have reached over half-a-million people through social media while videos from the campaigns have been viewed more than 34,000 times.

These figures were announced by the Chief Executive of drinkaware.ie Fionnuala Sheehan at the gala final of the 2014 dare2bdrinkaware.ie competition recently.

A team of students from DCU won first prize in this year’s competition with their campaign ‘No Sleep Lost – Don’t Lose Sleep over Where You’ll Wake Up’. This reached an audience of over 165,000 on facebook and involved a number of elements including a website, interactive drinks calculator, animation piece and viral video which focused on the real-life consequences arising from excessive alcohol consumption. They also mounted an extensive marketing and PR campaign to support the project which resulted in significant coverage across the media in recent months.

Organised by drinkaware.ie, seven teams were shortlisted in the competition and received up to €2,000 each to implement their proposed campaigns. The shortlisted teams were then invited to pitch their campaigns to a judging panel at a ‘Dragons Den’-style final at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. The judges included Founder and Chief Executive of Joe.ie and Her.ie Niall McGarry, Head of Media for UK & Ireland at PR Slides and owner of The Savvy Shopper blog Sinead Van Kampen, Publishing Director of Hot Press Duan Stokes and drinksaware.ie’s Fionnuala Sheehan.

“The idea behind this year’s competition was to empower students to create campaigns that raised awareness of the importance of responsible attitudes to drinking and engaged their peers,” stated Fionnuala Sheehan, “By enabling young people to create awareness-raising campaigns by students for students, the campaigns that have been rolled out over the past few months have not only been more creative than ever, they have also resonated on a different level with their target audience.”

The winners of the 2014 competition announced at the ceremony were as follows:

1.      Gold Award (overall best campaign): The ‘No Sleep Lost – Don’t Lose Sleep over Where You’ll Wake Up’ campaign by a team of students from DCU.  Awarded €3,000.

2.      Silver Award (first runner-up): ‘You Wouldn’t Drink 10…’, a video, website and poster campaign, produced by a team of students from DIT which reached almost 90,000 people through facebook, and whose videos were viewed more than 2,000 times. Awarded €2,000.

3.      Bronze Award (second runner-up): ‘Take it Easy’ produced by a team of students from Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, whose viral video campaign was viewed over 17,000 times and featured significantly on online media channels.  Awarded €1,000.

For further information on the competition and all the shortlisted teams, see: dare2bdrinkaware.ie.


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