Hasta La Creative!

Here’s a clever outdoor campaign from Publicis London for the homelessness charity Depaul that manages to tell two different stories with the same copy.

The ads are being placed on corners, with text on each side. If you read only the left side, the copy is all about the negative ideas people have about giving up a spare room to a homeless youth. But reading them in full, the ads actually argue for the benefits of volunteering.

“There’s another side to the story,” says the tagline.

Click the images below to enlarge.

Conceptually, the campaign is quite similar to BBDO New York’s award-winning ads for BBC America back in 2007. Those ads, also placed around corners, showed two sides of the same photo, with the tagline: “See both sides of the story.”

The clever use of text differentiates this new effort, though it will always be likened to the BBC work. See more from the campaign, plus credits, below.

CREDITS
Client: Depaul
Agency: Publicis London
Executive Creative Director: Andy Bird
Creative Director: Paul Mason
Art Director: Dan Kennard
Copywriter: Ben Smith
Head of Art and Design: Andy Breese
Designer: Dave Stansfield
Photographer: Mark Wesley
Account Manager: Tom Froggett
Head of Operations: Debbie Burke
Agency Producers: Steve McFarlane, Ed Page, Greg Collier
Art Buyers: Sarah Clifford, Claire Lillis

America’s homeless face myriad challenges, from mental illness to problems with addiction and substance abuse to amateur typography. The last of those is something that a Chicago art director is trying to address through a project called The Urban Type Experiment.

“As an art director it’s my job to grab people’s attention with great design every day. So I set out to see if great design could have an impact on people in the most ignored platform,” the site says.

Basically, the art director makes the acquaintance of a new homeless person every week, re-letters his or her signage, then checks back to see if the efforts helped at all. The site is pretty honest about how helpful the work has or hasn’t been, which makes it seem less like a roundabout self-promotion tactic and more like genuine outreach.

See more of the work below. Via Design Taxi.

Mannequins usually symbolize the consumer ideal of the “good life,” draped in couture and jewelry in department-store window displays. But now they’ve fallen on hard times in a JWT stunt meant to raise money for Amsterdam’s growing homeless population.

Agency staffers rounded up unused mannequins, dressed them in ragged clothes and placed them around the city with cardboard signs asking for money. Each mannequin also had a piggy-bank-style donation slot cut into its head, and donations went to advocacy group BADT.

Critics might suggest that using “dummies” somehow demeans or trivializes the homeless, but I think it powerfully underscores just how dehumanizing it can be to live on the streets.

Produced in a week on a budget of less than 100 Euros, the effort seems to have yielded a good number of donations and, more importantly, attention for the issue. 

Still, I wonder how many passed the mannequins by with barely a glance? And how often do we ignore flesh-and-blood human beings, shivering beneath rags and huddled in doorways? Sadly, such sights are so common, they can fail to move us, or else they simply don’t register anymore.

Homelessness dehumanizes us all. Even those of us who have homes.

Via Ads of the World.

Pleas to help the poor are usually ignored. So what if you turned things around and started advocating against the poor? Would anyone come to their defense?

Publicis London put that question to the test with an experiment for The Pilion Trust. The agency stuck a guy with a "FUCK THE POOR" sandwich board on a busy London street and filmed people telling him off.

After plenty of heated reactions, including a police officer telling him "that's offensive" and a near fight with a homeless man, the organizers flipped the sign around to say "HELP THE POOR" in the same font, same presentation, and filmed everyone ignoring him. The resulting film has already gone viral, with over 1.2 million views in three days.

It's an interesting experiment, but does it really prove that people care about the poor? It seems more like it proves that people enjoy being self-righteous on topics where they know most people agree with them. The truth is, it doesn't cost anything to be offended.

I'd like to see if those people who got upset really did care enough to give. Publicis should design another experiment with two guys, one with a "help the poor" just down the street from the "fuck the poor" guy. Then we'll see how many people who yelled at one actually donated to the other.

CREDITS

Client: The Pilion Trust
Advertising Agency: Publicis, London
Director: Jonathan Pearson
Creative Director: Andy Bird
Art Director: Jolyon Finch
Copywriter: Steve Moss
Producer: Adam Dolman
Director of Photography: Peter Bathurst
Agency Producers: Sam Holmes, Colin Hickson
Editor: Toby Conway Hughes at Marshall Street
Postproduction: Absolute
Sound Design: Wave
Typographer: Andy Breese

It's fairly well established that Abercrombie & Fitch doesn't want the wrong sort of people wearing its clothes. A couple of years back, it even offered (as part of a goofy PR stunt) to pay Jersey Shore star Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino to stop buying its apparel, saying his implicit endorsement "could cause significant damage to our image." Now, the clothier is getting heat for its supposedly exclusionary marketing policies once again—this time based on a 7-year-old quote from CEO Mike Jeffries. In the quote—dredged up in the wake of similar criticisms levied at A&F in a new book—Jeffries says, "In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids." That incensed a guy named Greg Karber, who decided to try to piss Jeffries off by giving A&F clothes to the most uncool kids he could find—homeless people. Despite Karber's best intentions, his video of the stunt comes off as forced and, in a way, exploitative itself, as he's simply using the homeless as a tool to trash the brand. (The charity aspect is clearly incidental.) But the video, posted Monday, is quickly closing in on a million views, proving yet again that hating on Abercrombie is a pastime most people can get behind.