Amnesty International (Help Get Them Home)
Development of a new promotional execution, temporary microsite and laying the groundwork for a targetted call to action on the new giant screen at Waterloo station.
Overview
Waterloo is Britain’s busiest station, with a departure board that runs across six platforms. Over Mother’s Day weekend in March 2014, JCDecaux gave that board to Amnesty International for free. Leo Burnett, also working for free, replaced the train times with the “journeys” of seven prisoners of conscience: where they were held, when they were taken and how long they had been gone.
The line was simple: on your way home, help get them home.
The concept
Playing this video loads it from YouTube, which may store data on your device. Privacy policyWatch on YouTube
Strategic Approach
The board got people’s attention. The hard part was turning that attention into action in the few seconds commuters had before their train left. It had to be fast, it had to work on any phone and it had to feel immediate.
- Keep the ask to one step: text in, no app or form to fill in
- Get supporter names from text messages onto the board in close to real time, so people could see their support counted
- Work within the screen operator’s content and approval rules for a live station environment
- Build a temporary microsite to carry the prisoners’ stories beyond the station
Deliverables
- Promotional microsite for the campaign
- Prototyping and groundwork for the live text-to-screen call to action
- Technical liaison between Amnesty, the agency and the media owner
- Launch support over the weekend
Outcome
More than 40,000 people took action. The work went on to win a D&AD Yellow Pencil for Brand Experience & Environments in 2015.
It was a short project with no budget and no second chance. When a screen is live in a station for one weekend, everything has to work first time.