The Advertising Campaign That Makes You Disappear
by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg on 21/04/10 at 12:02 pm
8 comments
Human trafficking is a huge problem world wide and with the 2010 Soccer World Cup only a few months away – this problem will become even bigger in South Africa.
TBWA\Hunt\ Lascaris decided to use this opportunity to increase awareness of the dangers these few months can bring. According to TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, South Africa continues to lag behind the rest of the world in counter-trafficking legislation.
“We don’t even keep comprehensive statistics of how many men, women and children are lied to, stolen from their families, smuggled back and forth across our borders and forced to live lives of indescribable horror as forced labourers, sex slaves and child prostitutes” said a representative from TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris.
So, together with their client the Southern African Counter Trafficking Assistance Programmer (SACTAP) they decided to launch a campaign “designed to drop sales” – that is, of the buying and selling of human beings to meet demands for forced labour and prostitution.
Their tactic was to approach a community the way human traffickers do: Like recruiters, they focused on children near schools, areas of extreme poverty, unemployment and prostitution.
“And like the criminals, we employed an element of deception: We created tunnels with false walls which precisely matched the walls behind them, so that when people walked through, they disappeared –leaving onlookers wondering what had happened to them.” Hereby, they force people to “imagine the unimaginable” – and so, the potential victims actually became the message.
Check out this video on how the campaign managed to pull off such a stunt:
Yolandi Janse van Rensburg writes about social media, marketing, life and, of course, cars. We say “of course” because Yolandi is nuts about anything on 4 wheels and runs Autofemme, a blog about cars. Our Ideate sub-editor is also the Heavy Chef girl at World Wide Creative. You can follow her on Twitter @Yolandi_JvR View more articles by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg.
Tags: advertising, viral campaign
fred hatman
Apr 21st, 2010
Brilliant! Very clever campaign.
Sifiso
Apr 21st, 2010
This is really amazing stunt, and it couldn’t have come at a better time – i hope it continues well after the world cup. Props yo!
Tyron Bache
Apr 22nd, 2010
Now that’s great advertising!
Mr Phillips
Apr 22nd, 2010
Awesome! If I saw this I weald be totally freaked! Nice 1!
Yolandi
Apr 22nd, 2010
I like how cleverly they positioned the campaign and aiming at the right people in the right places. Very smart
K8
Apr 23rd, 2010
Simply great! Wow!
Paddy
Apr 29th, 2010
That’s cool. Seems a lot of nice campaigns are being made for this problem. Did anyone check the campaign by Saatchi? Also very cool.
Let’s hope they do the job and stop this madness.
Modi
May 9th, 2010
Excellent, just plain simple excellent!