Little Johnny : Creative Case Study
Daniel Fleming
Managing Director | Aperture Media
We all know that in order to push a product and ensure that it reaches the correct demographic you’re looking for, you need to market the product. Marketing informs a consumer about the product or indeed the service you’re providing and in today’s society, the more creative and engaging your marketing campaign is, the more likely it is to succeed.
For Aperture Media we’re constantly looking for new ideas and new ways of creating exciting, engaging content in order to deliver the best product possible.
In 2018 we were approached by the production of an RTÉ Documentary entitled ‘My Other Life’ where we were asked to create an advertising video to help market the release of the documentary online. We were given complete creative control as the brief entailed us to really push the creative bounds and to try and create a marketing piece that hasn’t been seen before.
‘My Other Life’ explores Mental Health issues in Irish Youth, a subject matter that needs to be highlighted and discussed. After a lot of concept creation sessions and individual brainstorming we finally developed the idea for ‘Little Johnny’. Our writer and creative director, Jordan Murshed, conceived of the piece which had a strong message to those suffering to open up and speak to someone about their problems.
Once the poem itself was written, we moved onto the pre-production phase. Here, Jordan worked in collaboration with the documentary’s Director in order to write a script that would be a strong visual representation of the thematics discussed in the poem itself. We drafted and re-rafted until eventually, we were happy with our story. The final script follows ‘Little Johnny’ – a secondary school youth from a lower-class family, dealing with the struggles of coming from a broken home with no one to turn to. We wanted to touch on the fact that Mental Health and Mental Health illnesses are something that can happen to anyone so we decorated our main story with excerpts from different characters from all walks of life.
The project took two days of shooting with about a week of post-production to complete. The end product was published online and to our delight it went viral, accumulating tens of thousands of views across multiple social media platforms. The project trumped our initial expectations and following the online success the piece was aired on RTÉ 2fm, a national public radio broadcaster.
From this, we established that the key to a successful creative marketing campaign is written in the name. Be as CREATIVE as you can be. Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box and explore new territory.
Often times the craziest ideas tend to be the most memorable.
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