Corporate Communication. Sixth Edition by Joep Cornelissen

Author:Joep Cornelissen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-05T20:23:24.297883+00:00

Case Study 7.1 Amnesty International’s Refugee Nation Campaign

Amnesty International, the global human rights NGO, has in recent years focused most of its campaigning on the plight of refugees around the world. The year 2016 saw a record number of people being displaced because of war and crises around the world. At the same time, Amnesty felt that not enough people were caring about the issue. Research across the globe showed in fact that indifference and prejudice against refugees continue to grow. Amnesty took this as a starting point to approach Ogilvy New York, a creative advertising agency, to develop and support a public relations campaign to raise awareness of the refugee crisis. Amnesty briefed Ogilvy with the following objectives for the campaign: to bring awareness to the refugee crisis as a cause; to ignite a positive conversation about the issue; and to engage the world in supporting refugees.

Ogilvy created a promotional campaign for the ‘refugee nation’, which, for the first time in history, was going to compete at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The IOC had admitted a team of refugee competitors to compete in the Olympics: five track and field athletes from Sudan, two swimmers from Syria, two judokas from the Democratic Republic of Congo and one marathon runner from Ethiopia. These athletes no longer had a country to call home. Ogilvy cleverly developed a campaign to tie in with the Rio Olympics, centred around the concept of creating a nation and national symbols. The Ogilvy team developed a flag and anthem for these displaced Olympic athletes. The flag was created by Syrian refugee Yara Seid, featuring an orange canvas with a black band, representing the life vests the athletes wore as they set off in boats for a better life. Another Syrian refugee, composer Moutaz Arian, composed the ‘national’ anthem, but without any words to signal a common humanity that crosses national borders.

The campaign centred around promotional events related to the ‘refugee nation’, including a promotional advert, staged events with the athletes and press briefings in the lead up to the Olympics. In all of these promotional materials, Amnesty’s brand name hardly featured at all. Following the campaign brief, Ogilvy instead went for a generic message style (see Chapter 6), focusing on raising general awareness of the cause of the refugee crisis. The campaign went viral online just before and during the Rio Olympics. Celebrities and politicians, including Barack Obama, openly supported the campaign online. In all, the campaign managed, in terms of publicity, to garner more than 2 billion media impressions in total around the world. The success of the campaign also led to the refugee nation flag and anthem becoming part of our cultural heritage; with the flag in particular being recognized in public places and exhibited as part of the permanent collections of museums, including the MoMA and the V&A. On the back of this success, Ogilvy was recognized for its creative work and for the overall effectiveness of the campaign, winning an industry award at the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in 2017.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.