Angelus Foundation and Lime protect young people in Luton
Posted on Dec 19, 2016
A year ago the IPA’s first Pip Award was given to a team of four young marketers from the marketing agency Lime for their brilliant campaign idea, which supported the Angelus Foundation in raising awareness of the dangers of “legal highs”.
The Pip Award was created by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) as part of their Best of Health Awards and is an opportunity for young marketers to gain recognition for their creative talent while supporting a good cause.
The team from Lime responded to the award brief, which asked marketers to help “raise awareness of the dangers of “legal highs” and help guide young people to better information on what they might be considering taking”. Lime’s creative solution called “The Trojan High” involved selling young people “Ciao”, a supposed new “legal high” that was in actuality just a package with safety messages in it. This showed the recipients that when buying “legal highs” you didn’t know what you were really getting. And the campaign slogan was “Ciao! The World’s most mind-opening legal high”.
Lime was so engaged with this project that they decided to continue to work with the Angelus Foundation to put their ideas into action. And earlier this year the Lime team with the Angelus Foundation released Ciao in Luton, an area where Angelus had created a ‘Drug Aware’ programme. Here is a short film about their work together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC0VDvFetD0
Jan King, Director of the Angelus Foundation said, “Lime was brilliant. The campaign in Luton kicked off our work in a very creative way by suggesting that a new ‘legal high’ had been made to get around the law. It caused quite a stir but got people talking about how they were being duped. The team from Lime worked really hard on the project with lots of innovative ideas and it was a pleasure to work with them.”
In May 2016 the UK government banned the production, distribution and sale of “legal highs”, which are also referred to as new psychoactive substances (NPS). And on October 1st 2016 the Angelus Foundation merged with Mentor UK, which is the UK’s authoritative voice in building resilience and preventing drug and alcohol misuse among children and young people.
The former Angelus team is now bringing their considerable knowledge of “legal highs” to Mentor. Jan said, “With the change in the law we decided that we needed to put more effort into ensuring the resilience of young people and we’re best able to do that as part of a larger organisation”.
If you’d like to help Mentor UK take their work supporting young people forwards, they are currently looking for help with developing creative campaign ideas to raise the profile of their work in 2017.