Dog days pay off for ad grad

MARTIN Peat spent seven weeks this year furiously thinking about what makes women between the ages of 30 and 55 tick.

MARTIN Peat spent seven weeks this year furiously thinking about what makes women between the ages of 30 and 55 tick.

Peat, 22, leader of the Charles Sturt University marketing team that won the International Advertising Association's Big Idea competition in Australia, knew getting this cohort on side was the key to fulfilling the brief, which was to devise a plan to raise the profile and income of the little known not-for-profit group Assistance Dogs Australia.

Under the scheme, labradors and golden retrievers are trained to help people with disabilities, often in wheelchairs, with everyday tasks such as picking up dropped keys, turning on lights, pressing the button at traffic crossings and answering the phone.

"We had to increase the public profile of the organisation and increase donations by 20 per cent," Peat says.

Women aged 30-plus "want to give to charity", he says, but someone needs to approach them. With an office staff of 10 and a limited number of helpers, there was no question of sending teams into shopping centres to ask for money.

Peat's team constructed a strategy that relied on donation via SMS, something that has not been tried by not-for-profit groups in Australia before.

The beauty of the idea was that with billboards, radio and other advertising, they could appeal to the women, who could act instantly by dialling the word "iCan" to donate the relatively small sum of $6.60. The donation would appear on their next phone bill.

Women commuters, for example, who caught sight of an ADA billboard could SMS the donation and a return SMS would prompt them to look at a website for further information about the campaign and the organisation.

The other key to success was designing an appealing ad campaign, iCan9. "It had to be positive imaging, along the lines of `if these people get a dog, they can live an independent life'," Peat says.

"We used nine actors representative of people on the waiting list, the idea was `nine individuals, nine dogs, nine partnerships'."

ADA plans to use elements of the plan in future.

Peat, who works part time at Sydney's Nova 96.9 FM radio station, is graduating from CSU in Bathurst, NSW, as a bachelor of business with a marketing major and a bachelor of arts majoring in communications (advertising).

Next week he heads to New York to take up a scholarship that includes a 10-week placement with the BBDO Worldwide ad agency in New York, whose clients include Pepsi, Fedex and Gillette. He wants to eventually land a job in a Sydney ad agency and clock up real-world experience before possible postgraduate work.

Although he has not yet seen the cult television hit Mad Men ("It's always on when I'm at work"), he plans to watch it before he goes as part of his market research.