Book a Rent A Crowd
How can you attract maximum attention quickly for a health issue? Book a rent-a-crowd!
When Heart UK wanted to organise a PR stunt to raise awareness about the importance of having cholesterol checked, they knew exactly how we could help by providing a tailor made, attention grabbing crowd.
The Crowd Goal
The aim was to get encourage people to check cholesterol levels, and raise awareness of the dangers of high cholesterol. The issue is a serious one since around 60% of people within the UK possess high cholesterol levels. Dealing with it is expensive, costing the NHs around £16m every year. Regular testing could reduce this cost substantially, since action can be taken quickly to minimise health risks.
Heart UK’s PR agency wanted to ensure maximum publicity while ensuring people didn’t feel pressurised or having the message forced on them.
How could this be achieved?
The PR stunt had to be undertaken in a fun, friendly, engaging way which would instantly capture attention. A crowd activity was deemed a perfect solution.
Working closely with the PR Agency and Heart, we organised a mixed age and gender crowd of 100 people, closely representing the UK population. As it the chosen location was London, a mix of commuters and ordinary people was ideal. Consequently, 60 people in the crowd took the role of business commuters complete with laptop bags, briefcases, smart phones and smart business clothing. The remaining 40 people wore ordinary casual, everyday clothing.
What made this group stand out was the fact that 20 of the group were also provided with large yellow chub suits designed to illustrate the effects of cholesterol. These people had to weave in and out of the remaining 80 strong group who appeared shocked and horrified while travelling down the escalators at Charing Cross Station. They also had to shout out, make a noise and use mobile phones to film the moving cholesterol characters.
The Crowd Results
Not only did it capture the attention of other people using Charing Cross Station, it led to a lot of publicity. The videos and images appeared on the national press and it generated the exact type of publicity that Heart required.
