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Hidden Portraits raises awareness for the defacement of female portraits and the need for
representation, and brings back women to the streets of Jerusalem.

Challenge
In Jerusalem, defacing of Out-of-Home (OOH) ads featuring women became a common
phenomenon in recent years. Women’s faces are being blotted out, spray painted, covered with stickers, scratched out, and in extreme cases burned down. These actions are carried out by ultra-orthodox extremists that find the portrayal of a female image in public offensive.
To avoid the financial costs of these attacks, OOH companies, advertisers and agencies have
gradually stopped using women in OOH ads. As a result, women’s faces have disappeared from billboards and posters across the city, and a girl growing up in Jerusalem never sees images of women running for city council or promoting brands in the public sphere.
It was about time to face the issue. To shake advertisers, agencies and politicians out of their
complacency, Israel’s Women Network (IWN) decided to raise awareness to the phenomenon
and call on the authorities to act more decisively in favour of women representation.

Idea
How could we raise awareness for what is happening to women if the vandalists deface any
attempt to depict them? How could we bring them back to OOH in a way people paid attention to our message? Extremists don’t accept women but they wouldn’t dare deface a man’s portrait, so we decided to use the male image to our advantage. We would use a man as a “trojan horse” to actually feature women; by playing with the minds of the radicals we would call upon society as a whole to take a closer look at what is going on around them. That’s how we came up with Hidden Portraits, an OOH campaign featuring (a mosaic image of) Israeli actor Tsahi Halevi representing the portraits of thousands of women who have been defaced over the years. The campaign alludes to the fact that “it seems the only way to represent women in the public sphere is to hide them behind a man’s face”.

Execution
At a first glance, it seems like just another portrait of international actor (Netflix’ Fauda star),
Tsahi Halevi on a poster. But taking a closer look, it reveals its true nature: the image was
created from a mosaic consisting of thousands of portraits of women who’ve been defaced in
Jerusalem’s OOH over the past decade. Women featured included public figures from different
backgrounds - journalists, politicians, actors, models - all prior victims of vandalism. 
The poster calls passersby to “Take a closer look”, followed by a QR code. Once activated, the
QR code launches a mini-site with further information about the problem, and those using Google Maps will see a female version of the poster on their mobile instead of the street male version – the female version actually features Lucy Ahrish, Tsahi’s wife and a journalist/news anchor whose image has been erased several times.
The campaign calls on national and local governments as well as law enforcement bodies to do more in the fight against these terror acts.

Relevancy
The campaign addresses the need for female representation, the most elementary level of
representation that, unfortunately, is still not a given in many societies.
We found a creative, smart and effective way to depict women that allowed us to raise
awareness for the problem without giving space to the vandalists to deface yet more women in
the process; shielded by a man they didn’t dare touch the OOH and we were able to bring
thousands of women back into the streets, to the general society.
Choosing OOH as the media for this campaign was in itself a creative choice. We were
consciously fighting the problem in the same place where it happens, not shying away in fear of repercussions, speaking directly to the society, law enforcement and even vandalists alike. As maybe the last true mass media platform, OOH was the right place to take a stand in the eyes of everyone, the right “battlefield” to shed a light on the issue of defacement, show it will no longer be tolerated, and call for political action.
Finally, this work is relevant because creativity has an increasingly important role in addressing
critical societal issues, to bring consciousness and promote change.

Impact
Describe the impact: What were the tangible results of the project? How effective was the idea and execution/craft in solving the challenge? What is the potential impact in the future?
The campaign reintroduced thousands of women to the Jerusalem public domain, where none
withstood for so long, sparking a national debate around a long-neglected topic: it became one of the most discussed issues, making it to the top news of the country.
National awareness of the defacement issue jumped from 38% to 63% and perception regarding the importance of the topic jumped from 23% to 60%.
According to JCDecaux, the OOH campaign generated 60M impressions and an estimated
earned media value of 1.5 Million ILS in Israel. But Hidden Portraits spread far beyond the
country, reaching an international audience of 208M across Europe, UK, USA, South America
and Australia.
Most importantly, for the first time in 12 years no OOH female images were defaced nationwide
during the running of this campaign. The campaign brought back women to the streets of Israel
and put the need for representation at the top of the public agenda.