A positive, adventurous approach
If you want people to want to learn, at least make sure it promises to be fun. Make it a positive story and spice it up with a pinch of adventure. Are you a pathetic loser who needs to get rid of her smartphone addiction? Not at all, says The Guardian. You are an adventurer who will finally recapture her own brain. We get a campaign under a positive and adventurous title, which the copy even managed to find an inside rhyme for: Reclaim your brain! It sometimes takes some creative work, but you can basically sculpt any educational topic to be positive and adventurous for the right audience. Can't you pull it off? Then there's something wrong between target audience and subject.By the way: while the copy with Reclaim your Brain is positive, the smartphone monster illustrations used are pretty nasty and negative: that combination makes it fun.
Dramatic
The lesson series is built on a clever character structure that makes it emotionally-dramatic.
Here's how the drama works. You are assisted (as the protagonist) in your fight with the smartphone monster (the antagonist) by an undisputed expert in such matters: someone who has already written books about it (the serious helper). To give this all-too-serious fight a light touch, you are joined by a second companion, a sort of fellow scholar: an editor of the newspaper who, like you, is trying to kick the smartphone and gives a funny diary account of it in the newsletter (the funny helper).
Character structure of Reclaim your brain
Human
Also important: both the expert and the fellow scholar (as well as the smartphone) soon get a literal face in the emails: this makes our dramatic journey a lot more human.
Social
Not only do you get an expert helper and a funny helper for your challenge, the welcome email immediately asks you to invite other people to join. That makes the challenge more fun and makes for a higher success rate, writes The Guardian, but it also obviously increases the reach of the promotion.
Interactive
At the very beginning of the welcome email, you also get another interaction stimulus. You can fill out a "short survey" and comment on your challenge at the beginning and at the end of the coaching plan. Again, smart thinking: it's fun for you to compare before and after, and it's fun for the newspaper to gather info for additional articles this way.
Scannable design
All in all, the emails sent by the newspaper are quite long. They do have nice, and at the same time very direct copy. And they are designed to be very clear and scannable.
Nice work
We cannot find a point of criticism. Final sum? It's just sterling work by those Brits. Also feel like recapturing your brain?
Read more
