Adland's anti-slacktivism trend "liking won't help" - times three!

"Liking isn't helping" is the headline in the Gold Lion winning Singaporian ad campaign for crisisrelief.org. It sums up in one simple image showing people thumbing up around a baby with an amputated leg. Ouch.

 

Meanwhile, in Sweden - Unicef came out with this ad Unicef - Likes don't save lives . I'm sure we can all agree this is the same base idea, told in a different way.

BUT HOLD UP - also, in Puerto Rico we have Boy in Puerto Rico Gets Killed Over a Blocked Shot and like to prevent this girl from dropping out of school due to bullying... another execution on the same base idea, this time they also use youtube's built-in clickable features to really hammer the point home. No, liking the clip won't stop that gun from killing someone.

Here's the kicker - all three of these campaigns competed in the Cannes Lions this year. No, I don't think any one of the creative teams knew about the prior ideas, don't be silly. We're all tired of slacktivists, this idea was just ripe for the picking and executed in three very different ways.

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Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
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caffeinegoddess's picture

The ironic thing is that these are groups that still want likes on their pages.

AnonymousCoward's picture

Yeah... Well speck ads for Cannes don't really help either. How 'bout awarding something that actually makes it easier for people to donate money or volunteer. Or to something that helps solve these problems instead of just coming up with a "clever" visual pun.

James Trickery's picture

It's spec ad. Or ghost ad if you will. Speck is whale fat. Or a ham. :)

Though you might know something that we don't. It's a bit odd that the Crisisrelief ad only appeared on advertising archiving sites after it won a Cannes lion. Isn't it?

The two others were posted here when they aired.

Cannes doesn't award for effectiveness, well they do now, but it's primarily a category and craft award. If it's the best press ad for a non-profit, it just is.