Social Ads & their impact on Society (ACF Ad)

As said in our first post, Advertising is not only used to raise awareness on some products or services; it can also be used to create awareness on some causes around the world that are of public interest.

There are some great examples of campaigns out there around the world that helped get attention on some matters that otherwise people would have neglected. The most common, and probably the most known one because of its exposure on TV, is the Ad about anti-smoking campaign, which emphases the problem by the use of images and video really strong that "force" the viewer to stay focus on the message!

However, here today we are going to present a superb campaign proposed by Australian Childhood Fundation (ACF) that not only acted using TV and Radio ads, but also launched a touching campaign in the streets of Melbourne around the end 2008.

The campaign started as a need to raise awareness among Australians that didn't really see in child abuse a problem, as the CEO of ACF reported in a Media Release "Australians want to believe that this problem is happening in another person’s neighborhood, in another community, not our own. The Stop Child Abuse Now Campaign asks adults to stop being bystanders and start taking action." (ACF Media Release, 2008)

Words written on the poster are "Neglected children are made to feel invisible". In this campaign they used mannequins of the size of children, where it was possible to see only their legs coming out of the poster, and the shape of the body remains behind the white paper. (Picture and comments are taken from "Programming Blog")

As it is possible to see the impact of having an image like this posted in the streets would be clearly great, not only will people firstly stop and see what is about (maybe also scared at the idea that there is a real kid behind the poster), but then they will also be "forced" to look at what the ad is saying. Moreover, at the bottom left the ACF website is written, in order to lead people into action, i.e. having a look at the website and understand the problem.

Although this ad may seem a little bit too hard on the way is represented, in my opinion it is trying to make Australians understand, that in their neighborhoods, in their streets or maybe right next to their apartment a child is being abused and adults are just "passing by" every day and not listening to their chocked screams!

Thanks for the image to Programming Blog, and the possibility to use their ad to ACF.