SYDNEY: Controversial is one way to describe it. Highly effective is another. Amnesia’s response to an AdNews mock-brief is causing quite a stir in adland and beyond.
Late last year AdNews asked a number of agencies to suggest how they would develop a campaign to combat negative stereotypes of immigrants, with the results published in the AdNews Annual (14 December 2007).
Instead of submitting screenshots of a proposed campaign, Amnesia actually built a viral website. The site, www.kickamigrant.com, allows visitors to “kick” a bunch of migrants out of Australia, one at a time, with visitors competing to see who can throw the migrants further. The catch, is that after throwing a migrant out to see, visitors are served a results page, showing the cost to Australia’s economy of losing that migrant.
“We’re deliberately targeting people who may be more anti-migrant,” said Amnesia managing director Iain McDonald. “The message is delivered at the end – where we reveal that migrant are real people that play a vital role in society and have a big effect on Australia’s GDP.”
The site was launched in late December, with no publicity beyond the AdNews Annual. But a “back-end” was not integrated until mid-last week – meaning stats on user-numbers and game plays were not readily available.
In just six working days since the back-end was completed, the viral has racked up over 56,000 “kicks”. Not bad for a mock-campaign with no paid-media support.
But then Amnesia knows a lot about successful virals. It’s Paper Plane viral for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X computer game, which Kick a Migrant is partially based on, has racked up an incredible 211 million game plays from around the world.
While the Kick a Migrant viral has elicited an overwhelmingly positive response from the industry, some say the play on racist attitudes fails to achieve its stated purpose.
“Sadly, in my personal experience this debate highlights a great deal of racism in our industry,” was one response, while another commented: “I think it’s only clever in that it’s tapping into Australia’s deeply entrenched racism and therefore getting traction. Surly if the education program at the end was working there wouldn’t be 11,000 [at the time] migrants already kicked out and the option to Kick Again on the information screen.”
Others take a more light-hearted approach: “Hilarious. Being a pom, originally from Pakistan, now living in Australia . . . I find this particularly amusing!” and “That’s brilliant, I’ve just kicked out 10 migrants and cost Aussie about 4 million bucks.”
And finally: “I must say it took everything I had to over-ride the initial repulsion I experienced on the invitation to kickamigrant (migrant father and all) and so was pleasantly surprised with the unexpected outcome. Very clever.”
Story by: Mark Chenery
23 January 2008
