Existing Products Scott Harrand

“What’s playing on your mind?” Mental Health Foundation campaign

The Mental Health foundation’s campaign on mindfulness, a technique for coping with depression, employed the use of an interesting poster campaign.

The campaign is strange and eye-catching, to draw in the audience’s attention, not only to the strange figures in the image, but also to the cause they are trying to promote and raise awareness for. The advertisement is also memorable, which means, by extension, the cause is memorable.

Having such odd and almost disturbing imagery in their campaign provokes the audience to read the information provided in the text, in order to seek an explanation for the image. While the model’s faces are all obscured, the campaign shows a fair bit of diversity on a range of demographics, such as gender, ethnicity, and with suggestions of varying ages and social statuses.

The individual posters show grey backgrounds, in contrast to significantly brighter clothing. This may suggest that untreated mental health issues can give you a bleak world view.

“#MyDefinition” UNB Student Union CampaignThe #MyDefinition campaign was started by the student union of the University of New Brunswick. The aim of the campaign is to end the stigma surrounding mental health issues, and to teach people not to judge people solely based on their mental health issues. The campaign consists of a series of posters of real residents of the university, combined with their names, that are written in the same font and format of an official dictionary definition, listing their positive traits, as well as mentioning their mental health history crossed out, to signify that it “my mental health is a part of me, but it does not define me.”. On the campaign website, the posters are accompanied by the real stories of the people in the posters about their mental health has affected them. The campaign has a simple, but effective premise, and uses a range of different people, including a balance of genders and a few people of an older age, in order to best identify with a broader audience. The people in the posters are shown in fairly regular situations, often looking quite calm and often happy, with regular, everyday settings around them. This seems to be done to drive home the fact that people with mental health issues are just normal people, which is one of the aims of the campaign.

Amnesty International CampaignThis campaign, from Amnesty International, seeks to end prejudice and discrimination against people with mental health issues. The campaign takes portrait images of people in front of grey backgrounds, combined with writing in the black and yellow that is synonymous with Amnesty International. The text is generally written to show that the prejudices that people with mental health issues face, and how this prejudice can effect them just as much, if not more than, the mental health problems themselves. The way the images of the people are shot make them look confident, proud, powerful and defiant, which paints a positive image of people with mental illnesses. The tagline running throughout the series of posters reads “Mental health problems don’t discriminate, people do.”. The campaign seeks to end prejudices against people with mental health issues, and raise awareness for how such discrimination can affect people.

“Stamping Out Stigma” NHS CampaignThis campaign from the NHS aims to show the negative effect that mental health discrimination can have on people. The campaign utilizes a dark, black background that almost seems to consume the central figure in darkness. Over the mouth, there is a ripped shred of paper effect, with word’s like “rejected” or “nutter” written on them, words that reflect how they are made to feel or words that other people use unfairly against them. The campaign drives home the fact that this discrimination leaves lasting, negative effects on people. The models used stare directly into the camera, often with emotional expression in their eye, in order to create empathy with the viewer. The text above their heads tends to give a short explanation of the sort of discrimination the person in the poster experienced, in order to combine a human face (that the viewer can identify with) and a sad reality of what can happen to people who suffer mental health discrimination and how it can affect them. While much of the poster is made in black and white, parts of it that the campaign makers seem to want to draw attention to are made in bright red, to draw attention to them and to help them stand out in contrast. These parts include the logo of the campaign, “Stamping Out Stigma”, which is also made to look like an actual stamp, as well as parts of the text, with the word “discrimination” written in bright red text in order to make it stand out. Red also tends to have negative connotations, so combined with the word discrimination, the colour usage seems to be done to further emphasize discrimination is a bad thing. Also in red, but most likely for emphasis, is the website for the campaign, which means that it can be more easily seen despite it’s small text, and therefore making it easier for people to find information on the campaign.