Guerilla Advertising, Amnesty International

27th August 2007
Guerrilla Advertising, Amnesty International
Wrong Colour/ Wrong Opinion/ Wrong Faith

This campaign for Amnesty International placed plastic hands grasping on drains, with “Wrong Colour/ Wrong Opinion/ Wrong Faith” branded across them, giving the impression that someone was trapped behind the bars of the drain. I think this is a simple yet effective way to drive how the horrific fact that in too many places around the world, people are being punished and locked up for having a certain belief or looking a way that differs to the regime under which they live.

According to Jurgen Krautwald of Amnesty International, the aim was to draw attention to human rights violations. After design agency, Michael Conrad and Leo Burnett, placed these hands to drains around Frankfurt’s most frequented crossroads, 860 people signed up for Amnesty International subscription lists to protect against all countries that arrest or torture people due to their faith, opinion or colour.

I feel that this type of ambient advertising is becoming more detrimental to grabbing an audience’s attention. Consumers are becoming much more in control of the media they consume, advertisers can no longer rely on spoon-fed messages to mass audiences in the television, press and poster.

The concept of guerrilla advertising really inspires and excites me. The idea that designers can now place these forms of advertising in our every day world so that we are interacting with it, makes the message not only more interesting, but significantly unavoidable.

This types of advertising is pushing the boundaries of creativity, with the solutions often being extremely clever and witty and in some cases, deeply shocking. A sense of interactivity with an advert makes the issues it is presenting seem, perhaps, more real and believable. For example, ‘Smoke Box’, an anti smoking campaign by Dentsu Young and Republican for the Singapore Cancer Society, showed smoking areas surrounded in yellow box outlines of coffins, reading “Designated Smoking Area”. This, to me, is a much more persuasive method than simply writing “Smoking Kills” on a pack of cigarettes. This sort of advertising is much more close to home; it is interacting with your life.

What I particularly appreciate about guerrilla advertising is the simplicity. Nike hired KesselsKramer agency to design their very simple adverts around Amsterdam. Chalk ‘goals’ appeared on brick walls around the city accompanied by the classic Nike tick. The concept of ‘Just Do It’ was amplified through these simple drawings, encouraging kids to create their own football pitch.
The simplicity in this form of advertising, combined with well-observed wit, creates articulate and intelligent results. Guerrilla advertising is interacting with the consumer directly, whether they want it to or not. It is unavoidable.