Case Study – Crowd of 100 people for PR stunt on behalf of Heart UK
The Brief – To help raise awareness of the importance of getting your cholesterol checked.
The problem – Its estimated that up to 60% of people in the UK have high cholesterol and are not aware of it. This is a major problem for the NHS and its estimated it comes at a cost to the National Health service of more than £16 million per year.
In May 2019, there were more than 6.5 million prescriptions issued for lipid regulating drugs.
The solution – For the UK population to get regularly tested. If there is a problem with a persons cholesterol levels if it can be discovered early then action can be taken to minimise the health risk.
Hiring a Crowd of People to attract attention
The goal –To get people thinking about their cholesterol levels and take necessary action with a fun but engaging PR stunt.
Delivery – We worked with a leading PR agency on behalf of Heart UK to raise awareness and prompt people to think about their cholesterol levels. More importantly, for them to take action and get checked out. It was very important that the general public did not feel they were being preached at and did not feel they were having the message forced down their throat.
The message had to be delivered in a fun way while at the same time still bringing the subject matter to people’s attention.
We arranged a mixed gender crowd of 100 people of different ages and ethnic back ground. The crowd of 100 people was to be a representation of the UK population with 60 of them looking like business commuters (wearing suits, business dresses, laptop bags, brief cases, smart jackets, coats, handbags, umbrellas, smart phones) and 40 of them dressed in normal everyday casual clothing.
Of the 100 people, 20 of them were provided with large yellow chub suits to illustrate cholesterol. These 20 people had to weave in and out of the other 80 people in the hired crowd. The 80 people were to react in a shocked manner to the cholesterol moving amongst them on the cramped Charring Cross Station escalators. The crowd were required to shout what’s going on and to film the moving cholesterol characters on their mobile phones.