Bone marrow can save thousands of lives every year, but to find the right donors is not so easy since the donor’s cell profile has to fit in a very specific way to the individual case where marrow is required. That’s why lot of people should be medically examined, registered in a list of potential donors, and finally only some of them may be called even after a long time just in a specific case where their bone marrow profile fits – what’s a probability of 1 out of 1 million!
Well, such an important as well as specific issue, so small the chances to find the right person in any given case, and so many potential donors should be found – so, how exactly would you drive a campaign to find such donors?
This was the challenge given by the Mininstry of Health in France to L’Agence de la Biomédecine, a national public body in France, who decided to create in close cooperation with the EFS, the French organisation for blood transfusion, and other institutions a new campaign: “Veilleurs de Vie” (warden of life). The basic idea of this campaign was to create a lot of public attention for the topic itself, to present plenty of informations, and finally to find enough people willing to become a warden of life by beeing ready to donate some of the own bone marrow for others. The campaign started in Paris and was later extended to the whole country, with the target of finding 250.000 donors until 2015.
The main element to attract attention in Paris is an ensemble of immense red balls with pulsing red lights, symbolizing blood cells, placed on one of the most famous public places in Paris: the Trocadero!
Magnum, a French company well-known for creating unique lighting and display solutions for special events, designed and assembled those huge balls, and their partner LuminèS Sarl decided to manufacture the light solution inside those balls using as light sources our Seoul Semiconductor P4 LED in red – 180 printed circuit boards with 4 Seoul Semiconductor LEDs each, driven at 700 mA, using a DMX which creates a heart beating pulsing effect – what else is required to attract attention, even in such a prominent location!?
We are really proud: only our energy saving, highly reliable and maintenance free products were chosen to be placed on such a location, competing for attention with the Trocadero itself and of course with the Eiffel tower close by – and we hope and wish, of course, that enough people are attracted by this campaign as new members of the “Veilleurs de Vie”!
