MANILA – In an effort to highlight the value of hand-me-downs, old ads for a vitamin, a cable service provider, and a postpaid plan have all been turned into a campaign for non-profit organization, Caritas Manila.
The campaign features old ads from Potencee, Cignal TV, and Smart–dubbed and drawn so that they end up promoting Segunda Mana, Caritas Manila’s fundraising project, which calls for in-kind donations from people. While the ads can be confusing, they fit nicely with the brand’s second-hand nature.
“The team got the concept of second hand ads from the name of the shop-cum-donation drive itself, which is ‘Segunda Mana,’ a play on the colloquial term for second hand,” Dm9 creative Gelo Suarez said.
“It’s fun catching brows furrow when people hear the donations we solicit come in the form of ads. You could almost read the wrinkles on their foreheads, forming before us as we talked, spell out the question, ‘What do you mean?'” Suarez shared, when asked how brands reacted when they were asked to donate old ads.
“To show them what we meant, we presented initial rough edits of the ads we intended to make — a labor of love c/o the art director Sie Macha — and they’d smile when they saw how literal we were being about it,” he added.
Suarez also said that the ads were well-received by clients: “[Caritas] found the ads funny, and their humor sprang from the fact that the campaign was demonstrative of the donation drive it wanted to talk about–a classic form-follows-function kind of thing. We also like thinking the donor brands found a measure of relief in the ads–adding value to materials they’d already spent money on but were no longer in circulation, even with a possibly nobler dimension now too.”
Currently, the campaign remains online.
“The campaign had been intended to use varied media–TV foremost among them. We’d love for these videos online to air on TV, but currently there are hurdles to overcome. Permission woes, spot procurement, etc,” Suarez said. “We see the current online campaign as a 1st step; hereon, let’s see how far we can go. For the mean time, everything’s online, & we’d love for people to pass the videos around, reuse them, help Caritas spread word about Segunda Mana and get more donations out of it.”
