Every year Ad2 Portland (an advertising networking club for young professionals) takes on a different public service campaign for a local non-profit organization. This year’s challenge: Harry’s Mother, a program within Janus Youth that provides emergency shelter for runaway teens, and offers free family counseling to reconnect these teens with their families. The Ad2 team - Carrie, Daniel, and I - took on the challenge and, after many meetings over a beer at Rogue Brewing, developed the following creative concept with I executed.

Since our target audience was teenagers, we wanted the graphics to be edgy. Text is rough and off kilter, the colors are bright, and the images have a halftone effect. We wanted to show the divide between teen and parent and illustrated such with the torn paper. We used duct tape to illustrate the effect Harry’s Mother has which is to bring the two sides together. (Duct tape fixes everything right?) In the large poster version of this ad, we will be die-cutting the art into two pieces of paper with the diagonal jagged edge separating the teen from parent. To connect the two pieces, we will use actual duct tape (with Harry’s Mother info handwritten on it) so that exposed wall shows in between.

Harry’s Mother has been thrilled with the fruits of our labor so far, hopefully as we move into production it will prove to be a valuable tool for them. As for Ad2, we are putting all campaign elements, research, reports, creative together into one book which we will submit to a National Competition. Wish us luck on this St. Patty’s Day!