I have followed V Energy Drink’s V Raw campaign over the last few years as they used MySpace to offer dream jobs to young people.

This year I have been impressed with the blog-style site, with lots of content and resources, which drives traffic. The site is built for the particular audience needs – news, podcasts, music exclusives, film, advice, and interaction.

The focus of the campaign is heavily on releasing creativity and I am impressed that this year as V Raw is offering more creative jobs in hard-to-get-in industries, such as music, film, fashion and so on. With the economic climate this is a great initiative.

I have got involved with the team that has brought this together to help them with their blog outreach and advocacy aspects of the campaign. As a result I have noted that a program like this takes a lot of work from key partners from the client, OMD Fuse, The Glue Society and Modular Ideas to launch and keep momentum going over a lengthy campaign period. That was refreshing and personally it has been good to be part of that team.

It has opened up my eyes to the fact that a brand like V Energy and a mainstream agency can build multiple agency and specialist relationships, with no ego to get to the end game. They have demonstrated a total commitment to offer a chance to young creative people in industries hard to break into at any time, even harder today.

The agency has taken an interested view of using social channels to promote this campaign with only two exclusive promotional channel deals, the first much focused on MySpace and the second also working with Channel V.

The key points for me that points to a successful campaign outcome for V Energy and their agency groups are:

• They listened
• They learned
• They have a collaborative model of specialists and people who have brought this together with their various expertise
• The have provided content, but not controlled the distribution of content
• They are being useful, and
• They are enablers: providing rich resources to help people to do what they want to do.

V Raw has provided opportunities for 80 people so far and that number is set to increase this year as the campaign will offer at least a dream job a week, as well as an international placement. You can check it out here www.itallstartswithv.com.au.

Download the mp3 here.