VitaVape campaign
Fake news is something far more dangerous than many realize. To confront teenagers with the impact and dangers of fake news, we’ve developed a low-impact campaign aimed at raising awareness among them.
April 18, 2024
Mission
Social media has become an essential part of our lives, often blurring the lines between truth and falsehood. When young people encounter misinformation without realizing it, they form opinions based on this false information, which can influence their future decisions.
To raise awareness among youth about the accessibility and dangers of fake news, we created a fictitious campaign aimed at educating them to inspect information and perform research before accepting it as truth.
We target youth aged 13 to 17, a crucial age when people are easily influenced and are shaping their opinions on various topics, including weighty ones like politics.
Campaign
To execute this we chose a topic relevant to our target audience: vaping. We invented a fake vape brand called VitaVape, supposedly free of harmful substances and added with beneficial vitamins. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Indeed, it is.
To reach our audience we used various touchpoints within the campaign. We created posters using Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator, embedded with QR codes directing to our prototype website created on Figma, where our VitaVape could be ordered. Additionally, we designed stickers with the QR code for ordering the vape, alongside our logo, to garner more attention for our brand. These posters and stickers were spread at a high school in Breda.
Explanation
When youths visited the website through the QR codes, and placed orders for the vape, they expected to receive our VitaVape. Instead, they received a box bearing the message, “Don’t blindly trust everything you see,” accompanied by a brief explanation of our campaign. Enclosed within the box was a QR code leading to an explanatory video. In this video, we showed our preparations and repeated the importance of performing research before accepting information, whether online or in real life, as truth.
But we designed the website in such a way that those who performed proper research into the purpose of our vape would have recognized it as a fictitious campaign. The youth who didn’t perform any research were confronted with the fact that they need to do better research before believing something.
User flow chart and touchpoints
