Best campaigns of the last decade
Whether you have felt like the past ten years have flown or crept by, you have no doubt experienced a decade's worth of change and innovation. As we march head-on into 2020, weasked five industry leaders andD&AD Masterclass trainers to revisit their favourite campaigns from the last decade.
Fearless Girl
The genius of Fearless Girl is that, like C4’s brilliant repositioning of Paralympians as Superhumans, it leapfrogs all the pitfalls. Effortlessly.
In one word - ‘Fearless’ - it positions women as superior. So much better than legions of other words that could have been chosen: “As good as...”; “Equal too”; “Qualified”; “Underrated”; ‘Marginalised”; “Discriminated against”; “Really quite accomplished” and so on.
McCann New York and sculptor Kristen Visbal’s bronze cast has generated eye-watering statistics. More than $7.5 million of free publicity according to Apex News, reported on Bloomberg. 4.6 billion Twitter impressions in the first 12 weeks. Two thousand five hundred signatures were gathered in the first 24 hours for a petition to keep the statue in place for longer than a week. (They were petitioning to support an ad, for a global hedge fund. Many thousands more lent their names, and she stayed up for over a year.)
When first installed, Fearless Girl was one of only six statues to women in the New York metropolitan area. Duplicate statues followed in Oslo, Melbourne and London. By demand.
Arturo Di Modica, the Italian who had arrived in the US penniless, and who gifted his charging bull statue opposite Fearless Girl, sued State Street and had her moved. This was because Visbal’s bronze girl brilliantly deposed his work at a stroke, changing perceptions of its pioneering, brave American spirit into a symbol of testosterone-fuelled oppression and Wall Street tribalism.
The State Street involvement generated countless conversations and controversy. It is not clear whether, as an ad, the piece really shifted the needle to cause specific change, but she’s undoubtedly been a catalyst to positive developments and a new agenda.
130 centimetres high and 110kg of bravery, facing down 3,200kg of belligerent beef, Fearless Girl is a peerless advertising idea made real that breaks boundaries, categories and conventions on so many fronts. It really doesn’t get better than that.
-Will Awdry (Strategic Creative Director, Sutton Young Creative Consultants)
We're Here Because We're Here
I’ve decided to select Jeremy Deller’s 2016 memorial to the fallen in the Battle of the Somme, We’re Here Because We’re Here. His brief? Commemorate the first-day death of 19,240 young British service members 100 years ago in a way that will resonate with the public today.
On one memorable day, thousands of carefully-chosen and theatrically-trained young men appeared like ghosts from our past, right where modern life least expected it. In our train stations, streets, restaurants, shopping malls, right in the very fabric of our everyday lives. Right where they would be now, had they survived.
The artist’s decision in how they interact was fundamental to how we perceived that work, and ultimately, to its success. He decided that the ‘soldiers’ should walk; sit, smoke, stare, sing, but that they should not speak. Their silence became their power. Staring straight at us, they never crossed the frontline into our time. Like apparitions from our conscience, they sat, they waited—occasionally bursting into a private, communal song—but not one of them uttered a word to modern life. If approached, they handed the recipient a tiny white card, displaying name, rank, battalion and regiment of a real soldier who had died at the Somme one hundred years ago. Immediately and effortlessly, via sensitively presented facts, the vast scale of the tragedy is reduced right down to one contemporary individual being inextricably twinned with a life, lost forever.
In my view, it is a perfect project. Its a masterclass in visual and verbal communication made possible by the artist’s deep understanding of his audience.
- Mark Bonner (Co-Creative Director GBH London and D&AD President 2015)
It's a Tide ad
I’m pretty partial to the "It's a Tide Ad" campaign that won large in 2018. This, for me, is simply genius. I love that once you’ve watched it, you’re then convinced every ad is a Tide ad.
However, if I had to choose a PR campaign, I am in awe of "Meet Graham" - an Australian Road Safety campaign. This idea rewrote the rules of what it means to be a road safety campaign. Yes, it was shocking, but most of all, it created intrigue and talkability. Pure genius.
- Jo Carr (Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Hope&Glory)
#LikeAGirl
As a writer, it is my job to think about the way our words shape the world around us. So, looking back over the last ten years, I have got to highlight the Always campaign #LikeAGirl.
The campaign highlights how this phrase is used constantly, casually, as an insult - as if being female is something lame, something to be ashamed of - and it asks us to reassess what it means to run, fight, throw and act ‘like a girl’. It’s powerful because it shows just how embedded sexism is in our everyday language, and it forces us all to take responsibility for the culture we create.
It’s really interesting to compare this with 2019’s bold, quirky and utterly joyful Black Pencil winner, Viva La Vulva, which encourages women to love and celebrate their bodies.
- Kate van der Borgh (Copywriter)
BBC Blue Planet II
It’s a hundred years-ish since Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays coined the term Public Relations (alternative histories are available, see Wikipedia). Bernays had basically re-branded Propaganda for peacetime and more importantly Americas burgeoning consumerism. I sometimes wonder whether it’s time for another re-brand. PRs - somewhat ironically - have never had great write-ups in pop-culture, especially TV, think AbFab, Twenty Twelve, The Thick Of It. So, even though as a medium it has pilloried us PRs endlessly, I’m choosing a 2017 TV show as my PR Campaign of the Decade
Professor Richard Thompson, who discovered microplastic ocean pollution, said: "In my view, a few minutes of coverage by Blue Planet II (the mother pilot whale sequence) has done more to raise awareness than the decades of underlying research could ever have done alone."
The biggest PR briefs of 2020 and beyond will be to rally populations, hold corporations to account and pressurise governments to act, now. Cometh the hour, cometh the comms?
- Chris Bamford (Creative Director-PR, BBH)