THE GLOBAL COALITION AGAINST DAESH

TitleTHE GLOBAL COALITION AGAINST DAESH
BrandTHE GLOBAL COALITION AGAINST DAESH
Product/ServiceTHE GLOBAL COALITION AGAINST DAESH
Category A10. Public Sector
Entrant GLOBAL INFLUENCE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation GLOBAL INFLUENCE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production GLOBAL INFLUENCE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Credits
Name Company Position
Drew Charsley Global Influence Creative Director
Oscar Saunders Global Influence Art Director
Oliver Meech Global Influence Copywriter
Marc da Motta Global Influence Copywriter

The Campaign

What had never been done before was to create a consistent look, feel and tone of voice for the messaging coming from The Global Coalition, allowing the great variety of messages to have a greater impact. The work needed to stretch from talking about and remembering Daesh atrocities, to outlining the realities of life living under Daesh, to championing the amazing work being done by the Coalition to support the Iraqi government in rebuilding their country. A single creative idea was not appropriate to try and stretch across this content and we needed to avoid any sort of flippancy. The requirement was for a continual, powerful and consistently represented series of complementary messages, able to react in real time to what was happening in the broader global context. This had never been done before.

Creative Execution

We started to produce a constant flow of consistent, powerful pieces of truth, created centrally and then redistributed by the Coalition. We coordinated activity with what was actually happening on the ground in the military arena. We reached out to specific influencers and the followers of those influencers, generating engagement and creating a social media based distribution network for the narratives we were putting out. We tailored messages to enable marginalised groups to feel that the Coalition was an organisation fighting for them. We created campaigns that empowered people to understand how they could help in the online battle against creeping Daesh influence. We observed which narratives Daesh was pushing and quickly countered them with facts. We worked with in-country networks to reveal the truths of life under Daesh – the stories that they would least like the wider world (including potential recruits) to hear.

And it worked… The website traffic increased by 287%. The Coalition’s English twitter following increased by 633% The Arabic twitter following increased by 866%. Our stories appeared on Arabic television. Our graphics were rebroadcast by prominent journalists, academics and influential voices in the Middle-East. Most importantly, it affected Daesh. The Arabic twitter feed started getting DM’s from people in Iraq and Syria offering information on what was going on in Daesh held territory. We saw conversations on Telegram amongst Daesh followers questioning information strategy in the face of our work. Daesh supporters felt compelled to try and deface and change our copy as it cut too close to the bone. From a standing start and on tiny budgets, the campaign created a fertile bed for messaging and a basis for future information and influence campaigns.

We created a new website, designed to welcome people in and encourage people back. It worked as a source of information about the Coalition’s aim, but also as a place to get the latest details on what was happening in the battle for Mosul and the positive stories about rebuilding Iraq that the Coalition was part of. Next, we needed to build the first ever concerted, structured information assault on ISIS, both in English and in Arabic. We needed to create a consistent brand look and feel which could stretch to carry a wide range of messages, from announcements of military success, expressions of sadness for atrocities committed by Daesh, stories of positive developments in areas liberated from Daesh and campaigns to deliver specific counter-narratives. Beyond this, the campaign needed to be able to operate within incredibly quick turnarounds, often moving from brief to distribution in a matter of hours.