“Keep Calm and Carry On” pretty much summed up the mood last year. As the recession bit, the phrase was seen on tea towels, mugs and bags across the land, borrowed from a slogan that never actually saw the light of day during its wartime invention.

The original poster was created by the Ministry of Information in 1939, a typically stiff-upper-lip rejoinder to the threat of an invasion that never came. But somehow it hit a nerve 70 years later as a ironic response to the hyperbole of a financial catastrophe hardly anybody understood.

These days government advertising is a bit more sophisticated, thanks in part to the ad agencies who take up the briefs set by each government department and relayed through the Central Office of Information, as it’s now known. The COI is the second biggest advertiser in the UK, with a current budget of £391m (although both Labour and the Conservatives say they’ll cut it back if they get in power). It oversees public information campaigns, designed to educate people about risks to their health and security and persuade them to adapt their behaviour accordingly, now have to compete for attention among the noise of more conventional advertising.

In contrast to the usual “buy me” pitch government campaigns, and those of NGOs, have nothing to sell, which presents a challenge to agencies more used to creating ads for gas-guzzling cars and rice-pop cereals. We talk to four of them about how they tackle these commissions.

Swine flu
“The government has been waiting years for a big flu pandemic,” says Tom Ellis-Jones, account director at DDB London. “There hasn’t been one since 1968 and they come around about once every 40 years.” The government’s “framework for preparedness” includes detailed plans for transport, health and emergencies, he adds, as well as communications, which is where DDB comes in. It’s worked with the Department of Health on a number of public health campaigns, so when swine flu came around it was called on to get the message out fast.

The first campaign to raise public awareness of the disease was launched last April, shortly after the virus was identified and, says Ellis-Jones, was aimed at simply delivering information as quickly as possible. The first posters included text only, stating “Catch it. Bin it. Kill it” – a message originally put together as general advice on flu. This was followed up with a television campaign, putting across the same message.

DDB started work on a campaign scheduled for autumn shortly afterwards, because flu spreads most quickly at that time of the year. Featuring lurid green germs, it aimed to show how easily disease travels, and what the public can do to prevent it. “The main objective was to help stop the spread and remind the public of the importance of good hygiene,” says Ellis-Jones. “We didn’t want to scaremonger, we wanted to focus on what individuals can do.”

DDB was keen to use photography because it’s so believable, says Ellis-Jones, and it chose three familiar scenarios – on the bus, on the escalator and at home – each styled to be as non-specific as possible. Ellis-Jones asked John Spink at East Photographic to shoot the campaign, creating images that caught attention without being too stylised. The green handprints were created for real with paint, while the same-coloured sneeze was added in post. “We tried to create situations from peoples’ own lives,” says Ellis-Jones. “We also wanted to have some sense of physical grossness, to prompt people to use a tissue and wash their hands.”

The posters were then placed in public places in which swine flu could easily spread – on London Underground train carriages and escalator panels, on buses and bus stops and in shopping centres. It was also put in free newspapers such as Metro, which is distributed in all the UK’s major cities, usually at train and bus stations. A dramatic ad using similar visuals was also broadcast on television, and a different campaign went online. Each medium has its advantage, says Ellis-Jones. Television engages vast numbers of viewers for 30 seconds at a time, while the internet has even greater reach but less time to convey a message. Posters, however, can be placed in the environment in which germs are mostly likely to spread.

In the end, swine flu didn’t turn out to be a major killer – or at least it hasn’t so far – but the campaign did instil a new sense of hygiene in the public, with many workplaces adopting sterile hand rub routines for the first time. And that’s the key to public health campaigns, says Ellis-Jones. “The public and government sectors are very different. Private sector is about brands and persuading people to buy one product over another, while government campaigns are about behaviour change. If the message is relevant and delivered respectfully, it can instil a positive change.”

Alcohol awareness
VCCP’s highest-profile ad right now is a campaign for Comparethemarket.com, a spoof featuring Aleksandr the Russian meerkat. But the agency has also built up a solid portfolio of government campaigns, working for the Department of Health on a Hepatitis C campaign and the Food Standards Agency on saturated fat risks. It’s also worked on drink awareness campaigns for both the Home Office and the Department of Health, the two most recent of which provide interesting points of comparison. The Know Your Limits campaign for the Home Office targeted young binge drinkers likely to get into trouble on a night out, for example, while the Department of Health works older drinkers who consume dangerous amounts of alcohol in less obviously threatening environments. They took quite different routes, one emphasising health, the other on the danger and shame of getting much too drunk.

“Government campaigns are UK-focused so you don’t have the language problems of working across Europe, but we target quite specific groups,” says account manager Kirsty Gent. “The target audience’s age and social class affect both the ad we put together and the media we use to get it out there. Lower class people are more likely to be watching television for example, while younger people are more likely to be online.”

The ads are meticulously researched by both the relevant government department and the advertising agency, and the visuals used have to match up to the reality. Hugh Turvey’s X-ray style photographs attempt to illustrate the hidden dangers of drinking by showing “damage you can’t see”, and the ads carried text explaining hidden effects on the body, from mouth cancer to high blood pressure.

The campaign, run in association with the NHS and three major health charities, was thoroughly road-tested before it was released to ensure the public got the message. VCCP had previously tested a concept based on rotting fruit, but found people just didn’t understand it clearly.

At the same time the ads also have to be general enough to engage a broad spectrum of people. When VCCP developed a sexual health campaign for two government departments, it used speech bubbles to represent people to allow anyone reading it to engage with it. A campaign for the Home Office warning against binge drinking included young people online and on TV, while in the print ads it simply showed Jason Hindley’s shots of alleyways, canals and roads together with hard-hitting slogans. “We want to create situations people recognise,” says Gent, “rather than giving them an excuse to disengage.”

Tone is just as essential in keeping the audience onside, and VCCP is careful not to adopt the voice of the government. The creatives prefer to hold a mirror up to society instead, leaving the audience free to draw its own conclusions. The Know Your Limits campaign is a case in point – rather than stating “cut down on your drink”, it asks questions. “Would you let a complete stranger walk you home?” asks one, featuring two shadows in a darkened street, adding, “You wouldn’t start a night like this so why end it that way?”.

“We don’t want to preach, especially given that government campaigns usually centre on very common behaviour,” says Gent. “That’s what makes them interesting – every one has an opinion on them and they’re always controversial and sensitive subjects.”

Crimestoppers
Crimestoppers isn’t run by a government department – in fact that’s the whole point. It’s an independent charity that works between the public and law enforcement agencies, allowing individuals to pass on information while remaining anonymous. It recently ran a campaign against knife crime, which has reached a new high in the UK with the police recording 20,000 offences in England in 2008. It asked JWT London to get involved with a campaign aimed at the capital, but which had very little budget. “We had to do some magic,” says Ronnie Vlcek, who art directed the campaign with his creative partner Bruno Xavier.

They came up with a clever basic concept, involving printing a knife on the back of a newspaper so that it looked like the reader was holding it. Witty and provocative, this trompe l’oeil effect was also very simple, meaning they could use a stock shot rather than commission the image. “Ideally we would have shot it but there was no money whatsoever,” says Vlcek, adding that they sourced the picture from Getty Images and retouched it themselves.

They didn’t have a budget to place the advert either, but they managed to persuade City AM, one of London’s weekly free sheets, to publish it without cost in a prime position. They even persuaded the paper to move its masthead on its back page for the first time, but the City AM was up for the challenge – one of the advantages of working on a charity project.

Lack of funds also meant Vlcek and Xavier couldn’t “give wings to it as we would usually do” by developing the idea for poster or TV usage, but they did create a short video that they seeded on selected websites.

They had just four weeks to work on the campaign from start to end but, says Vlcek, they were really happy with the results. “I’m not talking about awards [the campaign was nominated for the D&AD Awards last year] but the fact that almost every teenager I bump into says they have seen it,” he says. “It was just a single idea to help make London a safer place.”

Vlcek, a London-based Brazilian, usually works on consumer projects such as Aero rather than charitable campaigns but, he says, there’s little difference between tempting someone to buy chocolate and urging them to report knife crime. “To be honest, it’s pretty much the same,” he says. “Persuading someone to do something or not is technically the same from a creative point of view, it’s just a spin in the same message. As Oscar Wilde says, ‘There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what you want, and the other is getting it’.”

Barnados
Ten years ago, children’s charity Barnado’s adopted a shock-tactic approach to its latest ad campaign, showing a toddler injecting heroin. Shot by Nick Georghiou and art directed by Adrian Rossi at BBH, the ad was accompanied by the following text: “John Donaldson – aged 23. Battered as a child … It was always possible that John would turn to drugs. With Barnardo’s help, child abuse need not lead to an empty future.” Aiming to show how adult problems are rooted in childhood abuse, the ads were a clever, if controversial, attempt to prompt empathy for social problems to which the public is often unsympathetic.

Last year BBH put together another campaign based on a similar idea, but with a very different execution. Showing an aggressive-looking young man dressed in a much demonised hoodie, it emphasised understanding over condemnation, including the line, “Not all children who need help are shouting ‘help’.” It was art directed by Nick Allsop, a creative at BBH, with the help of copywriter Simon Veksner, photographer Zed Nelson, and a young actor. “Barnado’s wanted to combine the shock tactics of a few years ago with a more empathetic style, and address the negative representation of teenagers and children in the media,” says Allsop. “They often seem to be presented as feral, wild animals.”

Presenting an aggressive youth in a sympathetic way is a tough call, and Allsop opted to use a clean, light colour palette, while keeping it realistic. He commissioned Nelson because of his background in reportage, and got him to shoot on the fly while the actor walked past shouting. “I wanted a loose, accidental feel so I gave the actor a line of swearing to do and he walked past yelling it,” says Allsop. “We were just outside by some garages at the back of a Camden estate. When we got the images back we cropped them really close in, to give the feel of a kid coming right up to you, shouting.”

BBH has worked with Barnado’s for more than a decade now, and Allsop says it’s considered an important account within the agency. He works across both commercial and non-product led campaigns, and says they offer slightly different opportunities. In conventional ads the imagery generally needs to be positive and light, while when working for charities or governmental departments, you can explore darker topics. “You can engage with more serious issues, which is great,” says Allsop. “Plus there are fewer restrictions on what you can do. With commercial ads, the advertising watchdogs are very strict on how shocking you can be – the idea is that you have been invited into someone’s life, so you need to mind your manners. But government or charity campaigns are in the public interest, so creating something more disturbing is felt to be justified.”

Government and charity campaigns also attract slightly different directors and photographers,
some of whom won’t work on other kinds of advertising, so the resulting work has a more editorial look and feel. Plus these ads are usually targeted at the domestic market, so even when a global charity is involved, more UK-specific imagery and word play can be used.

But in the end, he adds, it’s important to keep the similarities between these different types of advertising in mind, as well as the differences. “I think some government and charity ads focus too much on the dark side,” he says. “They lose sight of how people will be affected by them. The ultimate aim of these ads is to change peoples’ perception, so really you’re still selling something. You’re selling an idea.”