Better Things

I don’t know about you, but I always think of Reed, the job site, recruiter and supplier of temporary labour as a little bit evil. I don’t know all that much about them, but I bracket them broadly with recruiters, which condemns them to be dismissed instantly and without much thought.

But Reed have gone and launched a lovely little short film competition which has changed my perception of them a little bit.

Full disclosure here, one of the films, Sign Language was made by a friend of mine. It’s lovely, and he sent me an email asking me to view it and vote for it, which is why I ended up at the Reed site in the first place. And once there I was confronted with twelve short films, each competing to win the prize money, put up by Reed, of £10k. Their brief was simple: make a short film, no more than three minutes long, under the heading ‘workplace’. And they had over 250 entries. The shortlisted twelve are of a high quality and have wildly differing takes on the idea of ‘workplace’, but they all have relatively high production values and provide Reed with some great content which, presumably, they can go on to use for marketing purposes.

The whole idea is nice – Reed are funding genuine creativity, and generating a lot of  truly engaging content for what is in the scheme of things a tiny amount of investment. Using YouTube to host the videos also makes sense – leveraging the huge audience to drive traffic to the Reed site and raise awareness. Where they have dropped a ball however, is in adding some simple social sharing tools to allow voters to easily share their activity to Twitter, Facebook or bookmarking sites. They’ve got a ’share this’ link, but it’s small and gets easily lost – I would have recommended making a bigger deal of it, perhaps even using company logos rather than an off-the-shelf ’share this’ box to really drive sharing and therefore more traffic.

All in all, though, this is exactly the kind of multi-channel, engaging, content-driven campaign idea we like at Better Things.

Oh, and if you like Sign Language, my friend could use the votes. It truly is a heart-warming little tale, and raised a smile even from my blackened, cynical, marketing boy heart. Vote here.