Drugs on a Facebook Timeline

McCann Digital has used Facebook’s new timeline in an interesting way. For Israel’s Anti-Drug Authority they told the story of fictional character Adam Barak’s two lives: one getting addicted to drugs, one staying clean. In a ‘split page’ style you can retrace Adam’s choices and stages of demise (or happiness).

Visit Adam Barak’s profile here.

Update: I can see some comments on Twitter and Facebook circling around the fact that the timeline isn’t very elaborate, and consist only of captioned photos. Some think it is in principle a great idea but executed only ‘OK’ rather than brilliantly. One of the creatives, copywriter Daniel Barak (who is also the talent ‘Adam’ on the page), explains it below. It seems that a more elaborate story (e.g. using embedded videos, check-ins, tweets etc.) would definitely require working together with Facebook’s engineers.

Here is Daniel describing the creative process in his own words:

“In the beginning it was a realistic double profile, filled with statuses, Youtube links (music), check-ins (for example, the drug user checks-in at a hospital), featured albums, life events and basically every feature facebook offers. I worked on it for about 3-4 days straight, just posting and trying to place every post in its right place. But after I had finished something changed and all my work went to the crapper. Just because one status had moved to the wrong side of the timeline, it messed up everything with it.

So after building the timeline 5 or 6 times with the check-ins and other features, I decided that I prefer having a working and understandable idea rather than something much more impressive that could mess up and no one would understand it.

Not to mention the fact that I’ve grown my hair and beard for the past 2 months just for that.”

Agency: McCann Digital Israel