The medium's the message. Sudsy too.

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The medium's the message. Sudsy too.
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jul 2, 2009 - 1:10:35 AM

Sometimes the best approach in advertising is a direct one. And you can’t get much more direct than a recent campaign in Vietnam, where poor personal hygiene is a huge public health problem.

The challenge: How do you get people to wash their hands after they use the bathroom?

Solution: Create a poster that's actually made from soap.

The poster was the idea of Grey Group Hanoi for the World Bank’s Ministry of Health and the Water and Sanitary Program.

At the top, written in black on a small yellow piece of regular paper, are these directions: “This poster is made of soap. Use it to wash your hands!”

Attached below are dozens of squares of blue paper coated on both sides with soap. The perforated squares can be torn off and used just like bar soap to wash hands.

Put up two months ago, the posters were hung outside of public restrooms in 50 locations in the cities of Son La, Phu Tho, Hung Yen, Nghe An, Binh Dinh, Ninh Thuan, Dong Thap and Vinh Long.

The World Bank's aim is to make washing one's hands after using the bathroom a habit among Vietnamese in order to cut down on diseases spread through hand-to-hand contact.

“Handwashing notices may be common in toilets in developed countries; however, in Vietnam, until this campaign, they were nonexistent,” says Aaron Everhart, an account director at Grey who worked on the campaign.

Grey knew from the start that it wanted to put the posters outside of public restrooms. That was sure to get the posters noticed, since that form of advertising that is basically unheard of in Vietnam.

The agency also wanted the message to be a simple call to action. After a little brainstorming, it settled on the soap poster.

“This disruptive innovation is memorable and impossible to ignore, therefore connecting the desired behavior with the core message and inciting trial immediately,” Everhart says.

The posters also address a very practical matter by providing the soap, which one would guess would not be commonly available at a lot of restrooms.

The agency estimates that millions of Vietnamese were exposed to the message, either directly, seeing the posters themselves, or through the extensive TV, radio and web coverage the campaign generated.