A history forgotten. A future lost. TBWA’s latest viral video campaign reveals a real cause for alarm. With only a camera and microphone in hand, the ad agency hit the streets to conduct Vox Populi interviews with South African students at university campuses across the country. The findings were shocking. Although your average second-year medical student can tell you who said ‘I’ll be back’ in Terminator 3, they can’t even tell you which South African Nobel Laureate wrote the autobiography ‘Let my people go.’ If you don’t know the answer, then it’s time to put down Heat magazine and visit the Apartheid Museum.

TBWA had the following to say about their campaign: “A mere sixteen years after the fall of Apartheid, our history and the lessons it can teach us were being systematically forgotten.  So we decided to expose the reality. And start a conversation. After all, the most important step in addressing a problem is knowing that there is one.

So we took to the streets and interviewed our youth directly. We simply asked them to identify a series of famous people. First popular culture icons and lastly a famous anti-Apartheid leader.

Our suspicion turned to reality. Over 86% of the people interviewed easily recognised the popular figures and failed to identify the South African anti-Apartheid leader.

What is the consequence of this ignorance? A history forgotten is a future lost.”

Besides the obvious social lesson here around the importance of cultural history and heritage, there is a second eMarketing lesson to be drawn from this campaign. That lesson lies not in the message, but in the medium. And that medium is the power of online video. It’s great to see South Africans integrating video in their campaigns to enhance and convey a message on a viral scale. With the advent of uncapped ADSL in South Africa, I look forward to seeing far more video incorporated into digital advertising. Congratulations to TBWA on an innovative and inspiring campaign, it has definitely motivated me to pay the Apartheid Museum a visit . You can find more of TBWA’s work here.

Also check out:

• Our Viral Vault