Hasta La Creative!

You’ll want to wipe that smile off his face.

Lowe Campbell Ewald’s chilling new public-service campaign for Haven, a Michigan nonprofit that assists victims of rape and domestic violence, strips away the “Mr. Nice Guy” veneer to reveal the threat lurking behind the disarming grins and sweet talk that abusers use to confuse and control their victims.

“I’ll be really nice,” begins a happy-faced dude in the spot, below directed by Oscar winner Angus Wall. But he turns out to be anything but. His mood swing is understated and utterly convincing, especially in the Ray Rice era, when heroes can be revealed as villains in the few seconds it takes for a surveillance camera to capture their shameful acts.

“This highly emotional approach will resonate with our audience,” says agency creative chief Mark Simon. “Our hope is that it reaches those who are suffering and provides them with the knowledge that help is out there.”

The tagline is “Live without fear,” yet for a campaign all about escaping terror, there’s plenty of it here. Still, the message—across all media—is powerful. One print ad entwines the phrase “I’m crazy about you” with “You crazy bitch,” while a bus-shelter poster (perhaps the campaign’s best execution) features the headline “I Love You”—which, upon closer inspection, is actually composed of hundreds of tiny threats like “You’re gonna pay for this” and “If I can’t have you, nobody can.”

By focusing on the mind-set of perps, Haven puts the blame in the only place it belongs. “It is the choice and actions of the abuser that causes abuse,” says Beth Morrison, the organization’s CEO. “The victim is never at fault.”

CREDITS
Client: Haven
Agency: Lowe Campbell Ewald
Chief Creative Officer: Mark Simon
Group Creative Director: David Bierman
Art Director: Kelly Warkentien
Copywriter: Nancy Wellinger
Producers: Mary Ellen Krawczyk
Account Executives: Joe Gaulzetti, Nicole Reincke, Alyssa DeYonker
Production Company: Elastic
Director: Angus Wall
Director of Photography: Eric Treml
Executive Producer: Jennifer Sofio Hall
Line Producer: Shanah Blevins
Editing House: Rock Paper Scissors
Editor: David Brodie
Audio Mix: Lime

A Swedish subway ad got a lot of attention earlier this year by showing a woman’s hair blowing beautifully in the wind whenever a train arrived. And now it has inspired another attention-grabbing display.

Since there’s not much to it beyond the reveal of this new digital ad, also from Sweden, I’ll spare you any spoilers. Credits are below the video.

Via Ads of the World.

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CREDITS
Agency: Garbergs, Stockholm, Sweden
Creative Director: Petter Ödéen
Art Director: Sebastian Smedberg
Copywriter: Sedir Ajeenah
Photographer: Daniel Griffel
Account Manager: Ida Tenggren
Digital Director: Micke Ring

Martin Stirling already directed one powerful PSA about Syria—Save the Children’s incredible spot from last spring, which imagined if the crisis were taking place in London. But the Unit 9 director wasn’t finished.

With the United Nations General Assembly meeting next week, the world’s leading NGOs—Oxfam, Save the Children, Care, Amnesty and a hundred more—have banded together for a new PSA, directed by Stirling, that attempts to capture the horrors being endured by ordinary Syrians on a daily basis.

See the spot here:

The stylistic choice of using reverse footage almost becomes a moral choice here—it’s the hook that makes the piece haunting, and shareable, and thus capable of making a difference. The film is the centerpiece in the NGOs’ #WithSyria campaign, which drives viewers to a petition asking the UN Security Council to take next steps to protect civilians.

ISIS is dominating the headlines today, but the plight of ordinary Syrians remains critical. The death toll in Syria is now close to 200,000. Most of the civilian deaths are caused by “barrel bombs”—oil drums filled with explosives, chemical weapons and rusty nails, dropped from Syrian regime helicopters into populated areas. The same areas are often hit twice in quick succession in order to kill first responders.

“I really had no choice about whether or not to make this film,” Stirling says in a statement. “I was swamped by a couple of projects, and I tried my best to walk away but found it impossible. Whenever I thought about not making this film I was haunted by the images and stories I had come across in preparation for the ‘Most Shocking Second A Day Video’ earlier in the year.

“This film felt like an appropriate follow-up to that first one—it was creatively and stylistically different in a way which would hopefully capture the attention of a wide audience and the hearts of influential policy makers.”

Credits below.

CREDITS
Production Company: Unit 9 Films
Director/Writer: Martin Stirling
Producer/Exec Producer: Michelle Craig
DOP: Carl Burke
Focus Puller: Jonny Franklin
Researcher: Harry Starkey Midha
Production Partner: Atlantik Films
Editor: Alex Burt
Grade: Un1t Post
Colorist: Simon Astbury
Sound Design: Jon Clarke
Post-Sound Producer: Rebecca Bell
Factory
VFX + Post: Cherry Cherry
VFX Supervisors: Nico Cotta, Tony Landais
Compositors: Ergin Ishakoglu, James Cornwell, Doruk Saglam, Utku Ertin, Mertcan Ag, Nico Cotta, Otis Guinness-Walker
CG Artists: Bogi Gulacsi, Ceyhan Kapusuz, Zeynep Onder, Tony Landais
Digital Matte Painters: Stuart Tozer, Richard Tilbury
Executive Producer: Chris Allen
Line Producer: Sezen Akpolat
Music: ‘Youth’ Daughter
With Thanks to Matt Brown and Steph Hamill

Attention, dads. If you take a nap instead of reading with your son, he will grow up to be the kind of illiterate, all-around failure who gets misspelled tattoos about having no “ragrets.”

At least, that’s the moral of a new PSA from charity Save the Children U.K.—done in a similar style (and in fact by the same agency, Don’t Panic) as the group’s brutal March PSA about kids in Syria.

Here, a neglected kid, Jack, is ultimately unable to hold down a job, or a relationship, or simply to function in the most basic ways. It’s the kind of nightmare scenario that should spur any parent with half a brain into carving out some sacred story time with their offspring, stat.

It might seem a little hyperbolic, or like it eventually descends into black comedy. But stick with it to the end to understand why the extreme presentation (and accompanying touch of levity) ends up being appropriate, and makes a weighty topic easier to digest (even if it lacks the storybook-and-celebrity-menagerie quirkiness of one other approach to the genre).

The choice of book, Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, is a pretty excellent fit for the message, subtly reinforcing the importance of literacy in helping a child make sense of a fundamentally social and not always friendly world, while also framing the kid in question as in particular need of attention from his pops.

Hopefully, though, Jack doesn’t grow up to get a tattoo that says “No regrets,” either.

Racism doesn’t just manifest in overt statements and gestures. It can also take shape in more subtle ways—and still have devastating effects.

A powerful new spot from Australian public mental health organization beyondblue portrays a series of scenarios where quiet but very real prejudice—mainly in the form of unwarranted sideways glances, nervous shuffling, and insensitive jokes from light-skinned strangers—takes a toll on the psyches of Indigenous Australians, a group that includes Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.

The clip from agency Marmalade has more than 400,000 YouTube views since being posted July 28. Some commenters over at Campaign Brief find it a bit too blatant. Yes, the ominous character who appears in each setting to personify and rationalize racist inclinations makes the theme quite obvious. But maybe that’s a good thing. The point of the ad is to shine a light on often unspoken subtext, and it’s hard to do that without making the insults truly explicit.

Plus, as straightforward as the message is, much of its emotional impact still comes from the body language of the actors, not the copywriting. That said, closing line does drive the point home particularly well: “No one should be made to feel like crap just for being who they are.”

Don’t you just love an epic dildo battle? Well, yeah, as long as it’s not your kid waving them around the front yard.

This new ad from McCann New York is all about dildos. But it’s not all about dildos. Check it out, and then read my take below (where there are obviously spoilers).

Watch the spot first. Spoilers below…

Why this PSA is genius: If we make a sweeping generalization about the sort of conservative people who generally defend their Second Amendment rights, we would suggest they may also be sexually conservative. Showing some boys playing with vibrators might not be all that shocking to a liberal. Heck, it was an Ikea campaign. But to people who don’t normally think kids playing with guns is a big deal (trust me, I know these people), seeing kids play with vibrators might be shocking and memorable.

Why this PSA is necessary: It’s National Safety Month. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, two children per week were killed in 2013 in unintentional shootings, and two-thirds of those tragedies were due to unsecured guns children found in a home. That means two-thirds of those tragedies were entirely preventable. Or as Evoleve—the advertiser in the PSA above—puts it, “It’s the right to bear arms. Not the right to be a dumbass.”

“Are there any unsecured guns in your home?” is a hard thing to ask another parent before you drop your kid off. But as this ad shows, it’s necessary. Since I live in Georgia, the state with the most school shootings since Newtown, where we just passed a sweeping new open carry law that allows more guns in more places, I know I’ll be asking it of any parent I leave my child with.

Those who are weirded out by epic dildo battles might also want to ask if there are unsecured sex toys.

Here’s a spot-on, if disturbing, visual for how kids stumble across disturbing images and video while browsing online.

The online and print campaign, for child-safety nonprofit Innocence in Danger, features images of kids, each with three mouths open in horror—one mouth in the normal spot, and one where each eye should be.

Created by Publicis Frankfurt, the effort is aimed at jolting parents into recognizing and addressing the potential dangers of letting their kids surf the Web too freely.

According to Innocence in Danger—creator of the equally disturbing real-life emoji campaign—many children search for terms like “sex” and “porn,” while others accidentally stumble upon graphic scenes, but few discuss what they’ve seen.

While it’s a good use of the visual, this definitely isn’t the first time we’ve seen mouths for eyes. One of our favorites was 2012’s Irish eyes ad for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Atlanta, but you can find the “mouth eyes” meme all over, even ruining the lovely Stop Girl. 

Via ABCNews.com.

Here’s a quick way to sober up after a holiday weekend: Watch this intense, claustrophobic safe-driving PSA from the U.K., aimed at young male drivers who appear to be a terror on the London roads.

“Friendships are critical to this audience. And the tragic message—that by driving too fast, they might kill the very friends they are trying to impress—is one that really hits home,” M&C Saatchi CEO Camilla Harrisson tells the Drum.

The tragic moment here isn’t as dramatic as in the memorable U.S. PSA from a few weeks back, but maybe that’s the point. Perhaps Hollywood-style visuals offer a comfortable distance. This ad certainly doesn’t. The tagline is, “Kill your speed, not your mates.”

The campaign will run in cinema, video-on-demand and social media.

The Blind Book, a project by Brazilian agency DM9Sul, seeks to give sighted people in Brazil some insight into how it feels—as blind people do every day—to be denied access to literary works because they are not published in a format they can read.

Working with the Dorina Nowill Foundation and Danish healthcare company Novo Nordisk, DM9Sul got 10 leading Brazilian authors to produce a collection of new, original stories—on the theme, "Everything we cannot see"—that was then published exclusively in Braille.

This was meant to highlight the fact that only 5 percent of books in Brazil have Braille editions, even though half a million sight-impaired people live in that country. "Besides raising awareness, the project seeks to engage society in helping change this reality," says Márcio Callage, CEO of DM9Sul.

Sighted people will be able to experience the stories, but only by listening to them. There's a Portuguese audiobook version, and this website will offer films of the stories being read aloud by blind people.

This marks the second time in recent weeks that books have been used in novel ways to drive social-issues initiatives. The Drinkable Book, from DDB and Water Is Life, educates at-risk populations about hygiene and sanitation while its pages serve as filters to purify contaminated water.

Hopefully, such fusions of media and message, which transcend traditional PSAs and add extra dimension to their causes, will open some eyes and improve people's lives.

CREDITS
Client: Fundação Dorina Nowill Para Cegos (Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind)
Agency: DM9Sul
Chief Executive Officer: Márcio Callage
Vice President, Creation: Marco Bezerra
Associate Creation Directors: Everton Behenck, Rodrigo Pereira
Head of Art: João Pedro Vargas
Creation: André Blanco, Rogério Chaves, Gustavo Bilésimo
Customer Service Director: Cláudia Schneider
Customer Service: Cecilia Martines
Media Director: Silvio Calissi
Media: Renata Schenkel, Milena Bitencourt
Content Production: Anna Martha Silveira, Thais Sardá
Public Relations: Mariella Taniguchi, Bruna Lauermann
Audiovisual Production: Elisa Celia, Marcelo Stifelman
Digital Production: Daniel Vettorazi, Vinícius Mutterle
Website: Matheus Kramer
Graphic Producers: Débora Roth, Mariene Braga, Taisa Rosa
Illustration: João Azeitona, Mariana Valente
3-D: Ricardo Rocha
Final Art: Anelise Gomes, Karoline Nunes
Revision: Cecilia Santoli
Graphic Material: Cartonaria e Stilgraf
RTVC: Thiago Vanigli, Bernardo Silva
Film Director: Marcelo Stifelman
Film Production: Tape Motion
Audio Production: Coletivo 433
Voiceover: Loop Reclame
Client Approval: Daniela Coutelle, Bruno Dória, Priscila Saraiva

If you happened to catch this PSA on television in Britain this month, you might be left wondering if it is—could it somehow possibly be?—real footage. And that's the point.

The spot, from Grey London, shows an unborn baby drifting around inside the womb in what is surely the most real-seeming in-utero footage ever. It is, however, all CGI.

"The craft and technique that Digital Domain and [Radical Media director] Chris Milk put into making the ad was amazing, and the end result looks so brilliantly life-like that we hope people will walk away from it questioning whether it's real or not," says Grey deputy executive creative director Vicki Maguire.

The ad, for the British Heart Foundation, even has the baby do the voiceover (in a child's voice). She talks about how she might inherit a heart condition from her parents.

"I wanted to create a sincere and simple piece of film, forging a deeply emotional connection with a girl who needs saving even before she is born," says Milk, who also made Arcade Fire's stunning interactive experience The Wilderness Downtown. "The story is told in a world that is familiar but still a mystery. She's invited us in because she has something to say. Something vital."

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: British Heart Foundation
Agency: Grey, London
Creative Director: Vicki Maguire
Copywriter: Clemmie Telford
Art Director: Lex Down
Managing Partner: Sarah Jenkins
Business Director: Eve Bulley
Account Manager: Grant Paterson
Account Executive: Isaac Hickinbottom
Agency Producer: Vanessa Butcher
Creative Producer: Gemma Hose
Planner: Ruth Chadwick
Media Agency: PHD, London
Media Planner: Monica Majumdar
Production Company: @radical Media
Director: Chris Milk
Visual Effects: Digital Domain
Editor: Brian Miller
Producers: Ben Schneider, Sam Storr
Postproduction: Digital Domain
Soundtrack Composer: Vampire Weekend
Audio Postproduction: Grand Central