VMO Fundraising Campaign Uses Audience Views To Pay For Sight-Saving Surgery

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

New Zealand advertising boundaries have been expanded in a new audience measurement digital billboard campaign that uses viewer engagement to generate donations for charity.

This is a New Zealand market first, namely a smart campaign triggered by viewer engagement was a collaboration between VMO, Specsavers, The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ, Together and Cummins and Partners.

Running in proximity to Specsavers and one of Auckland’s busiest shopping precincts, the interactive campaign, conceived by Together, empowered viewers to ‘give the gift of sight’ over the festive season. By simply looking at the creative, shoppers generated a donation on behalf of Specsavers to The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ, helping to raise $10,000 to pay for sight-restoring surgery for up to 400 locals in need in Fiji.

Margi Mellsop, Engagement Director, Fundraising and Communications at The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ told us “Fundraising is an ever-changing platform and charities have to constantly devise new ways to maintain relevance and meaningful encounters with their publics. This campaign was the perfect marriage of new technology and our engaged corporate partners, but also with our supporters and we would like to thank everyone involved for their support.”

Powering the campaign was VMO’s proprietary audience measurement tool, DART (Digital outdoor Audience in Real Time). The DART technology registered the engagement and the served a message of thanks to the viewer. A total of over 25,000 engagements were measured over the duration of the campaign, significantly exceeding expectations with over double the estimated views.

Gordon Frykberg, General Manager VMO NZ, commented, “We are pleased that we have been able to support such a worthy cause via our technology. DART’s ability to measure audience engagement has been fundamental to the campaign’s success by creating an interactive way of capturing audience attention to fundraise.”

Specsavers Head of Marketing Planning NZ, Julie Fisher said, “The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ has been Specsavers’ national charity partner for many years, with a portion of every glasses sale going to the sight saving work that the charity does in Fiji. Recently, we’ve been working with The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ to come up with a series of unique ways to raise more money for the great cause and so when we learnt about the new technology available, we knew we had to get involved. We were thrilled to raise a further $10,000 through the sight for sight audience measurement billboard.”


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