Uniting young music fans for a good cause
The charity War Child have a history of using music for good. For the second year running they were working with O2 to put on intimate London gigs featuring huge artists like Coldplay and Florence and the Machine in the week leading up to the BRIT Awards.
The gigs were an amazing experience for the lucky few who got tickets in the ballot, but we wanted to do more, spread the War Child message to all music fans, not just a handful.
So we tore up the original brief and created ‘Wear It for War Child.’
Wearing a band t-shirt is a great way for people to show they’re really into music, a huge amount of people own them. We Invited music fans to dig out their favourite, take a selfie and share it with the hashtag #WearItForWarChild. With that very simple act any music fan could show not only that they cared about music, but they cared about War Child.
With 2 weeks from brief to launch and a very limited budget we needed to move quickly. To kick things off we printed a ton of band-logo-style t-shirts featuring our hashtag. We used these to make gifs and posts to launch the campaign. We created video-on-demand ads to run on All4 and sent our shirts to musicians and celebrities, asking them to take a selfie and share the message with their followers.
Photos started pouring in and the movement exploded across Twitter and Instagram. We surprised people with tickets to the sold out London gigs and encouraged everyone to donate to War Child.
The hard work payed off. We smashed our targets with a massive 1.28 million people getting involved in the O2 War Child campaign. #WearItForWarChild has been the most popular activity O2 have ever run on Instagram, generating over 200,000 likes over the two week period.
The campaign also had multiple endorsements from celebrities and influencers including, Game of Thrones star, Maisie Williams who generated over 130k likes on her #WearItForWarChild photo. As much as it has been a great success for O2, it has been invaluable for War Child, raising over half a million pounds for them and earning them the support of music lovers all across the UK.
#WearItForWarChild is now an annual campaign for O2 and War Child, going from strength to strength.