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PROVO — A group of students from Brigham Young University banded together to create a clever video campaign ultimately advocating for millennials to get in touch with their grandparents.
“There wasn’t necessarily a single person who created the idea,” said Lydia Hesterman, one of two art directors on the project. “We had a class assignment that challenged us to find a social cause and create a digital campaign that advocated for it.”
While other teams in the class chose some more broad topics with serious focus, this particular team wanted to take a more “light-hearted” and satirical approach, according to Hesterman, “specifically the issue of millennials not talking to their grandparents enough.”
The group, consisting of advertising students involved in BYU’s student-run advertising agency Adlab, collectively came up with the idea of Project GramGram — a faux service that would clue in everyone’s most beloved octogenarians who may not be tech savvy enough to sign up for Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram.
The video was filmed in front of one of the students’ professor’s house, Hesterman said. The grandmother used in the series is the actual grandma of the project’s creative lead, Stew Tribe.
“The response has been very positive,” Hesterman said, including that the service has been featured on Adweek, Mashable, The Dot and Deseret News. “A lot of people have been asking if it is a real service. We would love for it to be, and we might look into it in the future, but it’s awesome to know we came up with a fake product that is valuable enough that people would actually use it.”
In addition to Tribe and Hesterman, other students who were part of the project were Sean Tanner (account manager), Matt Henderson (filming and color grading), David Pierce (video editor, website developer), Brad Hill (video editor, website developer) and Frank Finan (art director).
You can get a full sense of the group’s initiative on www.projectgramgram.com.
