Amersfoort, Netherlands We were meeting with the organizing team for the national healthcare campaign in Holland. The campaign has hit a deep nerve in trying to push private insurers back out of the market place and arguing that there is not a national healthcare system when huge numbers are not participating because of an “own risk” system requiring significant additional payments that are preventing people from using health insurance. Suddenly, someone opened the door of the conference room, and announced that the truck was here. In no time, any other business was deferred, as we all went down to the driveway behind the building to see the truck.
Being old school, I assumed we were all being dragooned down to help unload boxes of some sort or another from a delivery truck, but not this time. Instead we were greeted by a giant campaign prop. This was something else!
The truck was painted in the rainbow colors of the campaign with the cross signifying the health care fight. There were huge metallic letters fabricated over the bed of the old truck, an Opal Blitz, with theater lights spelling out Eigen Risico or Own Risk. When the designers started pulling stuff off the truck, I quickly realized that we hadn’t seen the half of it yet. Two more pieces were manhandled off of the truck. Once it was placed upright, it became clear it was a punching bag like one you would find at a state fair. But this one was rigged to a computer which made it much different. The operator would type your name into a computer. An IPad would spell out that “Nils is Hitting Own Risk.” When Nils took his swing, the lights began flashing on the truck spelling out the words Own Risk again, very dramatically. Meanwhile there was a camera mount aligned to the overhand bag, so that when Nils or anyone else laid a roundhouse on the bag it also took a picture. There was router and wireless connections behind the IPad structure which caught the picture matched it with the address and sent an attachment of the picture to the swinger’s email. Within minutes, Nils had an email that was a short video of him hitting the punching bag and an explosion of colors coming out.
What an intricate campaign prop. One of the designers told me it only took two weeks to build the contraption, as it was a lot more than that just “thinking it through.” Talk about bells and whistles. Old school carney act comes to the digital world!
If you want to win a campaign, it helps to have props for actions and rallies, and here’s one that it is easy to imagine is going to be a hit when members are working marketplaces trying to get the word out to friends and neighbors.
This was pretty much one that it is safe to say most of us “couldn’t do this at home,” but as something advancing a campaign and creating a happening in town after town, this bad boy is going to be hard to beat.
