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Domestic violence affects one in four women. Yet it goes unnoticed. We wanted to expose this issue and do something about it. This is the story of how we did exactly that, despite zero production or media budget.
If you want to stop a man beating his wife, there are two approaches advertising typically takes: either target him to get him to stop or target her to get her to seek help.

But we found a third approach. Target the people around the victims: the people turning a blind eye to the problem. We wanted to confront society’s tacit acceptance of the issue and show people that by noticing it they could change it.
This insight led to an achingly simple poster idea: we would let the public ‘heal’ a battered woman just by looking at her. Using the latest facial-recognition technology, we would put the public in control, giving them the power to change a battered woman’s fate.

The poster would first show a woman who was beaten and bruised. But when people stopped and noticed, she would start to heal. And the more people who looked, the more she would recover.
We partnered with the charity Women’s Aid and won a bounty of free interactive outdoor media to make this idea possible.

The resulting campaign captured the public’s imagination. Journalists from around the world covered the story, reaching over 326 million people.

We had shown the value in not turning a blind eye to domestic violence.