If you see a text on a billboard sitting on the side of a street, you may or may not recall what it was selling. If you hear a car advertorial that is talking about a new model’s sound system, it might actually work. But if you wash your hands with the commercial, there’s no way you can forget that.
So there’s this Hospital Group in Sri Lanka called Asiri. They partnered up with giant advertising company Leo Burnett to create what may as well be a world premiere: a bus ticket made of soap. The point of their campaign was to encourage the use of soap as a simple, yet successful way to keep people away from getting ill.
They chose the country’s public transportation buses, considering they are renown hotbeds for spreading disease. Believe it or not, many illnesses, from colds to flu to hepatitis, can be stopped in their tracks if you just wash your hands regularly. Sure, a lory is not the place you find regular bathrooms, but if you turn the bus tickets in soaps, you may actually help people out. Here's how they do it.
The agency devised an innovative ticket-roll infused with soap so that every bus ticket issued to a passenger would have a secondary function. Sure, the campaign came along with posters and signage that educated the public about benefits of hand washing and how using this new innovative paper soap could help protect people from disease and illness.
There is one question that remains unanswered, isn’t such a strategy considered rather offensive towards bus commuters? Apparently, Sri Lanka’s Siri Group of Hospitals wanted to encourage people on public buses to wash their hands, as a preventive measure to avoid spreading germs. The idea didn’t come out of the sudden, considering the company claims they realized bus stations rarely provided soap for people to use.
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