The Guardian reports that the Royal Armouries have launched a new site aimed at encouraging young people not to carry knives. No To Knives was created for ‘just’ £85,000 and the idea behind it, according to museum director Peter Armstrong, is

to do someonthing worthwhile & relevant for the community in return for taxpayers money

In order to drive traffic to the site Royal Armouries have signed up a host of media partners with young audiences, including MTV & Kiss FM, who have pledged to deliver over £2.5 million of advertising. Apparently the next stage of the campaign will involve working to integrate the site with other platforms such as Facebook.

Whilst this is all utterly commendable, and seems to be successful judging by the number of ‘tags’ on the site’s Pledge Wall, I can’t help but wonder whether that £85,000 couldn’t have been spent in a better way. When so many people, especially the young, already have a plethora of favoured sites, it seems slightly quixotic to me to try and make them come to a new site when there are almost certainly plenty of places where this discussion could have been hosted.

I’m sure that Facebook, Bebo, MySpace & all the other big youth networks would have been happy to host branded areas to promote the campaign, where there wouldn’t have been a need to try to drive them to somewhere new and, dare I say it, not particularly cool (UPDATE: this report in The Guardian certainly suggests that MySpace would be keen to help). When reports show that 12% of all time spent online in the US is on MySpace, with the UK probably moving in a similar direction, it just strikes me that it is better to engage with people in the places where they already live online, rather thanspending money building them a new home which they may not want.

In discussion with Chungaiz (our resident expert on all things ‘youth’) about this, he felt that there was a definite need for a website to base the campaign around, but agreed that perhaps it didn’t need to cost £85,000 (Flash looks very pretty but isn’t necessarily cheap). Bono’s Product Red campaign has certainly demonstrated very successfully how this can be done, by basing itself on MySpace and then using free services such as Blogger & Flickr to extend itself (although they do have a website as well, the MySpace page has been the primary traffic driver to it). After all, what is the decision to become a ‘friend’ if not a pledge?

Despite all that, we obviously wish the No To Knives campaign all the luck in the world, and would be happy to help in any way that we can, even if it’s just writing a description tag for the site as they’re currently missing one.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.