Every Pin Tells A Tale

By Geometry , London, UK

For The Royal British Legion Brand The Royal British Legion

Highly Commended in category Design & Branding

In subcategory Digital - Experimental

WPPED Cream
Project Description
As past wars fade from memory, The Royal British Legion is facing a crisis of relevance – the Legion’s average donor is over 60. Plus, the charity is only thought about for the short period prior to Remembrance Sunday.
Our challenge was to leverage the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele (WW1) – a battle many have never heard of – to engage a wider, and especially younger, audience at an unexpected time.
To stand out and motivate a new, younger, audience to support a 100-year-old event we had to create a more modern experience than the traditional paper poppy.
Agency Solution
First we created a beautiful tribute to every son, brother and father who died. We wanted to bring their incredible stories back to life. 60,083 unique poppy pins with profound meaning and story behind them were made from shells and earth from the battlefields – each one dedicated to an individual soldier.
We directed users from the press ads to our mobile experience where they could unlock a more immersive poppy experience. Through AR technology, we turned the pin into a portal to the muddy trenches to discover more about the soldiers who fought and died at Passchendaele. When the box was scanned with Blippar on smartphones and tablets, mud would appear to fill the box on screen, flowing around the poppy, to show the horrible conditions of the infamous battle.
After the mud disperses a letter emerges from the pin, ‘voices of the fallen’ were recreated with regional accents to bring the soldier back to life. Users could then swipe through the dozens of emotive stories, diary entries and old photographs to learn more about the soldier, what else they achieved in life and who they left behind.
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