Livity celebrates one radical night on the tiles
Last night was a momentous milestone for Livity as we were recognised for our achievements at the Marketing Agency Association Best Awards. We scooped up three awards for NSPCC’s ChildLine Final Verse including Best Consumer Campaign, Best Social Media Campaign as well as Best of the Best Campaign given for overall campaign of the evening at the discretion of the judges.
Kate Brundle, Associate Director at Livity sums up the evening: “Final Verse is a project we are incredibly proud of. To create a campaign that reaches your audience with an important message and also receives industry recognition is a fantastic feeling. Winning Best Social Media Campaign and Best Consumer Campaign is an amazing achievement. We are so pleased we stood out to the judges and thank them for awarding us Best of the Best against so many other high quality campaigns.”
“Final Verse deserved this award because it was an absolutely inspired piece of work. It was built on a genuine understanding of their core male teen target group who are very difficult to reach and to get talking about ChildLine issues. Urban music, MCing and performing is at the heart of their culture and they create an authentic highly shareable idea which made it so successful in social media” said the judges.
Our rapturous celebrations were echoed at an event hosted by NESTA, for our nomination as one of ‘Britain’s 50 New Radicals’, awarding Livity with the distinction as one of the few organisations who are ‘changing Britain for the better, applying fresh approaches in practical and scalable ways, through social, technological, scientific and artistic methods’.
As The Observer pointed out in their article, “Thomas Edison famously said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” and if last night’s celebratory-antics are anything to go by we would say Livity are on the right side of genius!
Interactivism hackweekend
Take one social problem. Add a hundred young developers and social innovators. A million post it notes. A thousand litres of soft drink. And tens of thousands of lines of code. Mix em together. You’ve got yourself an Interactivism hackweekend.
Just in case you’re wondering what the heck a hack weekend is it’s an event for programmers and designers to get together and collaboratively create programmes, apps and websites.
Interactivism had a social purpose and a youth twist, which made it even more fun. It was truly awesome to see people working together, developing their idea on the go and make it a reality over the two days. Coders hands were a blur they were coding so fast.
All the teams’ ideas were amazing. I particularly liked Slurker, which embraced online procrastination and used people’s social likes and appreciations to recommend jobs, careers and contacts to them. Because it’s based on existing behaviours and platforms it seemed likely to be adopted and I liked how it turned a behaviour and data into something useful.
Huge congratulations to everyone who took part.
Interactivism hack weekend was organised by Google, the RSA, FutureGov and Livity.
Google Interactivism: Young People’s Hack from The RSA on Vimeo.
The Stake
The Stake is a competition we’re doing with Channel 4 Education and Barclays, which gives young people the opportunity to pitch ideas for the chance to win a share of £100,000 and turn them into a reality…
The Stake meets the challenge of engaging young people on personal finance head on in an interactive, learn by doing, peer-to-peer led format. Throughout the competition thousands of young people will be pitching their ideas and completing various challenges along the way that help them get to grips with managing their money.
The top 20 ideas, as voted by the stakeholders on the site, will be reviewed by a panel of Channel 4 and Barclays judges and up to 6 winners will be awarded up to £20,000 prize funding for their ideas. The winners will be supported by Livity and Barclays mentors throughout the implementation of their projects.
The Stake is a non-traditional way of teaching finance or enterprise. It’s not about homework or complicated jargon. It’s about learning by doing, the process of peer-to-peer collaboration, sharing and supporting fresh ideas whilst helping to improve young people’s financial capability in the process.
Throughout all the work we do, we hold on to the belief that if you trust young people, they become trustworthy. If you give them responsibility, they become responsible. Our longest running project, Live Magazine, is a prime example of this, and so too is The Stake…
Watch The Stake TV advert here
somewhereto_ park
Jiselle Steele, regional team manager for Livity’s somewhereto_ project, reports back from her recent visit to a somewhereto_ in Belfast…
I visited Belfast to see Pocket Park, a somewhereto_ created by a group of architecture students who wanted to get creative with space.
Their aim was to create some green space in the city and redress the balance with the number of car parks. In Belfast city centre there’s the equivalent of 15 football pitches of parking spaces compared to only two and half football pitches of actual green space.
somewhereto_ is all about opening under-used space. We do this by getting young people and space-holders alike to think creatively about how they view space so that it can be used to allow young people to do the things they love.
Aaron and his friends transformed four on-street parking spaces into green space for the evening with the permission of Belfast City Council, with grass and flowers replacing the road, and bird-song replacing the drone of traffic going by. Passersby could take a seat in the somewhereto_ Pocket Park created by Aaron and his friends and children were able to make their own art with chalk drawings on the pavement.
The young people’s somewhereto_ coincided with Culture Night Belfast, a celebration of culture and the arts across Ireland with over 150 events spanning theatre, music, circus and literature. In the short time that I was in the city I came across a pop-up cinema, comedy in a caravan, street magic, live music in a square and a parade. Lots of spaces were opened to the public as part of the event as well as the somewhereto_ Pocket Park which helped to show the potential of linking young people and their passions to events like these to make their somewhereto_ happen.
The Reality of Ad-Sales
Andrea Gamson, Advertising & Business Development Manager for Live Magazine is feeling inspired after watching last week’s Apprentice.
Last week’s Apprentice has had the media industry talking. And it got me writing this blog post. After all, managing youth-created Live magazine’s advertising for 10 months now, since its commercial re-launch at the back end of last summer, I can honestly say if The Apprentice is anything to go by, that with the backing of the beeb and Lord Sugar we could be generating enough revenue from advertising to be the biggest youth mag in the UK market. We could extend Live’s unique production process to help thousands more kids from urban areas of the UK realize their potential, plus launch even more careers of the highly talented and often under undiscovered.
We (that’s me and the Livity team) would have undoubtedly secured the majority of funds from Carat, Mediacom and Maxus… and if all their clients targeted the 16-24s market we would have 100% done it with Live Magazine. Briefed with the challenge of “gap in the market” “freemium” and to know their market, the two teams went on to create a ladsmag for city boys (yawn), and an over 60s mag titled Hip Replacement (que?). Did they not hear the brief? Amazingly Team Venture (Hip Replacement) went on to secure £28k, with Logic’s outdated “Covered” having all ads being swooped up exclusively by Carat for a £60k per issue price tag.
Now I’m thinking I need an apprentice style pitch to the top 5 youth agencies signing up their brands or clients with youth strands for a years worth of ads! 10 years in media and I didn’t even know this was possible! I feel fired up!
The reality is, we don’t live in a reality show.
Last week’s Apprentice made selling advertising look easy. Just one pitch to each agency, and £60k ad revenue per issue for another ladsmag nobody even wants! And they didn’t even have an ABC!
If it were that simple our youth created “freemium” mag, that fulfills a much needed gap in the market and truly understands its audience (as its created by its audience) would be easily generate enough dosh to make a massive difference… to the kids who read it, the kids who make it, and to a dwindling youth mag market that’s lost core titles Smash Hits and Sugar in recent years.
But lets stay positive here, since Live Magazine’s commercial re-launch we’ve secured enough brand advertising to prove to ourselves and the market that the youth magazine market aint dead yet. Maybe young people just got bored of being told what’s cool, and moved to a place where they had the control?
Individual thinking, promoting positivity in young people, creating real world opportunities to gain skills, get mentored by an editor from the Guardian, or have help to get back into education after being excluded. Content that is tastefully tailored to an impressionable audience that celebrates natural beauty, refuses to litter its pages with “diet tips” celeb cellulite faux pas or the fetishising of a lipgloss. Live Mag puts the control back into the hands of its audience.
Live is created by ex youth offenders through to the brightest talents at university. Live Magazine’s current Editor Celeste is 20, fashion editor Jermaine is 17 and our music editors (Tasha, Leanne, Robbie) are 20,16 and 17 respectively. These talented opinionated inner city teens and young adults regularly break new music artists, and create incredible fashion and film campaigns. They get excited about campaigning for better education, debating the Met’s Joint Enterprise and arguing “For and Against” the issues important to them, like the Olympics.
Live – and it’s creators – don’t reflect the stereotypes adults and the mass media place on youth. I wholeheartedly agree with those who say co-creation is the future of youth media – we work with the next generation’s decision makers, thought leaders, influencers.
So come on agencies – some of you out there already love and support Live and for that we’re eternally grateful! But if I’ve not reached you yet, if you’ve not received a copy in the post, noticed my email or managed to speak to me on the phone – if I’ve not yet tapped into your psyche in some way – then you’ve got the power to commit budget to a product that really does good and changes the world. So get in touch. And put it this way – unlike Jim, I’m willing to negotiate!