Background
In the wake of several Australian health campaigns, fellow classmate Lauren and I decided it would be interesting to examine the use of the web to communicate health messages. ThatGuy.com was the 2007 winner of the Webby Awards’ Health category and is a website at the nucleus of a broader binge drinking campaign known as the ‘don’t be That Guy’ campaign, introduced in late 2006. ‘That Guy’ is coined in reference to that person everyone knows who drinks too much and then turns into someone you spend the whole night trying to avoid! Everyone knows them and anyone can be them.
Who is behind the site and campaign?
Funding came from the US Department of Defence, who invested $2 million in an effort to stop 18-24 year old servicemen from boozing up and doing stupid things, or as John Howard might say ‘just letting off a bit of steam’. (Maybe they should introduce this for the Aussie ‘diggers’.)
The site was designed by public relations consultant Fleishman-Hillard Inc. in partnership with the Chris Farley Foundation, an organisation that was borne out of the death of comedian Chris Farley of substance abuse at 33.
Success as a health campaign
One thing we noticed in researching health-based websites was the need for interactivity and striking graphics. No one actively seeks to be lectured on their health! Thatguy.com is very graphics heavy and is fun it its use of illustrations and cartoons. It opens to a 3D streetscape, audio projecting street-like sounds and a taxi zooming in from the side. Billboards on rooftops point you to sections such as ‘Who is that guy’, ‘Fun stuff’ and ‘Facts’. Its aim is to be engaging, entertaining and encourage people to return and generate interest among friends.
In Australia, we’ve seen anti-smoking and safe driving campaigns use highly graphic images to portray the deadly consequences of certain actions. Here we see fun and games used to get the message across. It can be compared to the approach taken by the RTA in their ‘pinky’ campaign, which used humour in an attempt to show that not even your mates or your girlfriend will think big of you for speeding. Unlike the Australian campaigns however, which use the ‘sit back’ passive medium of television, Thatguy.com draws on the interactive medium of the Internet, forcing users to actively engage in the communication.
Interactivity
Interactive games and features show rather than tell the viewer about the consequences of excessive drinking. One feature allows users to look at the ‘Evolution of that guy’ over the course of a drunken night from Sloberous Sweattoomuch to Drunkus Obnoxious to Projectus Vomitus. An Interactive Bar Tab Calculator allows you to calculate how much you spend each year on alcohol and a simulated boxing game depicts how a lame drunk pickup lines will only leave you punched out on the floor and loveless. The humour of Saturday Night Live, on which Chris Farley often appeared, is evident throughout the site. But unlike the show itself, here some of the jokes lose their punch and, in their politically correct form, come out a bit “drugs-are-bad-mmmkay”.
Problems with design
In terms of design, this website is very striking, interactive and fun to explore. The streetscape design lets you move around within it and the illustrations are great.
The biggest problem with the website is experiencing it in a vacuum. There is nothing really clear on the front page that tells you what the campaign is about or who is behind it. Jakob Nielson’s Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability states that the most important factor in a website is to make the site’s purpose clear: explain who you are and what you do; and secondly, to help users find what they need by emphasising the site’s top priority tasks. Thatguy.com fulfils neither of these objectives. Instead, the vital information is buried behind a very flashy and graphic front page, giving the user no indication of where to start.
The only way to really find out the details and background of the campaign is to click on the tiny writing at the bottom of the page, which says: “About this program”. This gives you some background on the program itself:
“That guy is a multi-media campaign that uses online and offline communication with the goal of reducing excessive drinking among young servicemen.”
The site also falls short in Search Engine Optimisation. It is not even listed in the first ten pages of a Google search for either ‘alcoholism’ or ‘binge drinking’. Its obscure name and general lack of content means it is unlikely to get as much traffic from a user who is not specifically seeking it out.
While the site gives some information on the Chris Farley Foundation, it does not link to any other sites or allow you to find out more information. The website for the Chris Farley Foundation itself has been deactivated. The best place to get more information is through their myspace site.
The importance of multimedia
What’s important to take into consideration is that this site was part of a larger campaign involving print, radio and TV advertising. Viewed within the context of these other mediums, the site shows how multimedia tools and the Internet are increasingly vital in marketing campaigns. Viewed in a journalism context, you need only look at the recent sacking of over 500 jobs at Fairfax to see how important the Internet and multimedia tools are for a job in the journalism industry.
Check out these other health Webby Awards winners:
www.trydrugs.net (2008) – This site allow users to try pot, coke and smack! Each drug affects your control of the mouse as the real drug might affect your own coordination. You are then bombarded with a number of pop-ups about bankruptcy, prison and overdoses etc. It’s a great design but there is relatively little to it and we seriously doubt it would change anybody’s mind about drugs. Perhaps if you were a hardcore gamer you might think: ‘No way man, I’m never going to be able to shoot anyone with my sniper if I can’t move the mouse accurately.’
www.invisionguide.com/heart (2006)
www.merck.com/mmhe/index.html (2005)
