Achoo! Gesundheit!
Surely you're aware that using a tissue is more socially acceptable than wiping your nose on your sleeve. But there's much more to paper goods than their role as a simple phlegm-collection agent.
That's the message that Georgia-Pacific was trying to get across with its Health Smart Institute, an initiative launched last October dedicated to finding ways to improve personal family hygiene products.
"The program provides free educational information on how to help maintain a healthy home environment through a variety of innovative information sources," says Adam Keats, Internet project manager with Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, the firm charged with making paper towels interesting to the public. [The program includes] printed materials, a toll-free hotline, a Web site, product packaging featuring the Health Smart seal and national school programs.
The interesting and interactive Web site is the element that caught the eye of the 1999 <netty.awards> judges. The site garnered an honorable mention in the interactive pr & marketing news competition.
The Web site is a kind of virtual paper-products amusement park. Consumers can test their knowledge about common germs through an online Health Smart Awareness Challenge (our editors aced the test). They can tour a nicely designed virtual home to identify germ hot spots. They can download print-formatted educational activities, read up on health tips and information from "Advice from the Experts" and access results of a national survey on America's hygiene practices. And there's plenty of other scholarly paper-related information, like the aptly named white paper on germs in the household.
"Beyond a doubt, the first line of defense in preventing disease transmission is effective handwashing," the white paper reads. "Hand drying is a critical step in this hygiene process, and is important in reducing the likelihood of microbial contamination of food or transmission of other agents that can cause family illness. As communal towels are often contaminated with disease-causing microorganisms, single-use paper towels can greatly enhance the hygienic efficiency of handwashing."
Now do you have an idea of the challenge Edelman faced in making this even remotely interesting? The first step for Edelman was to get psyched. You can't convince others to get excited about paper towels if you think they're dull.
In a recent phone conversation, Keats seemed genuinely pumped about the potential reduction of cross-contamination in the kitchen.
The firm only disclosed the budget on background, but it was modest and included programming, graphic design, copywriting and project management. The target audience was parents and women ages 18 to 54. The strategy was to reach consumers with the Health Smart message about the benefits of using disposable paper products such as paper towels, toilet paper and paper napkins.
Edelman worked with Georgia-Pacific to develop a site that had a scientific yet consumer-friendly "clean" look and feel.
Edelman hired an illustrator to design a virtual home, where different items change color and highlight when the mouse moves over a hot spot. Using JavaScript, different sections within each room of the virtual home were either labeled hot spot or included a germ tip. To accommodate lower-end browsers that could not use the virtual home as designed, the site included a text page with all of the hot spots and germ tips.
"We knew going in that our biggest challenge from a technical standpoint would be reaching our entire audience," Keats says. "The site needed to appeal to lower-end browsers, which made up a large percent of the audience on the Georgia-Pacific site, but we still wanted to be able to push the edge and be more interactive. Finding the answer for both ends of our audience was crucial."
The companies also assembled more than a dozen lesson plans, activities and resources in a "Teaching about Germs" section. The documents, including "Germ Terms," "Germ-ometry" and "Hands-on Washing" were formatted in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) to ensure their design and layout consistency from the printed versions to the Web.
And it worked. Granted, we're not talking Amazon.com numbers, but the site proved there is an audience out there for paper product research - if the site is alluring. For example:
- According to the Web site's usage logs, more than 4,200 individuals visited the site from October to February.
- Edelman's media relations campaign helped bolster site traffic. More than 150 people visited the site through links on the sites of PointCast, MediaLink and NBC affiliates in Nashville and Providence.
- The consumer brochure has been the most frequently downloaded file, being accessed more than 1,300 times. At more than 2 megs per download, that's pretty good.
- The virtual home has been the most popular feature, with more than 300 unique visits to the page.
- The "Teaching about Germs" section has been the second-most popular section, with the Scholastic teacher/parent activities being downloaded 1,643 times.
Not every project is going to be earth-shattering, in fact many border on the mind-numbing. But with the right attitude and some good ideas, even toilet paper can be made interesting.
Says Keats, "There is an important message to send and we had to find a way to make sure people heard it."
(Adam Keats, Edelman PR, 312/240-2623, [email protected].)