2019 Glass: The Award for Change

#TIMETO - WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE

Title#TIMETO - WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE
BrandTHE ADVERTISING ASSOCIATION / NABS / WACL
Product/Service#TIME TO CAMPAIGN
Category A01. Glass
Entrant LUCKY GENERALS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation LUCKY GENERALS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production ANOTHER FILM COMPANY London, UNITED KINGDOM
Credits
Name Company Position
Lucky Generals Lucky Generals Lucky Generals Lucky Generals

Background

During late 2017, in the wake of sexual abuse allegations against prominent men like Harvey Weinstein, hashtag #metoo became the symbol of an international movement against sexual harassment and violence. In March 2018 The Advertising Association, NABS and WACL came together to create the same kind of movement within UK advertising and marketing. The result was the #timeTo initiative, which aims to end sexual harassment in our industry, kicking off with a major behaviour change campaign.

Describe the cultural / social / political climate in your region and the significance of your campaign within this context

Sexual Harassment is a major issue within the UK advertising industry. A survey by #timeTo has shown that 1 in 4 UK advertising employees have experienced sexual harassment in their careers and 1 in 5 female workers have already been sexually harassed by the time they’re 24.

Describe the creative idea

Our creative idea was ‘Where would you draw the line?’ We invited the UK advertising industry to think about when the line from normal behaviour into outright sexual harassment might be crossed. We could then direct them to the #timeTo code of conduct to help them check whether they had been subject to, or the perpetrators of, an offence.

Describe the strategy

Our audience for this campaign was the ENTIRE UK advertising industry, including many well-meaning individuals who would never see themselves as sexual harassers, but whose behaviour might still inadvertently affected others. We realised that if we only castigated behaviours that were obviously inappropriate, our audience would simply nod and say ‘Yes that’s terrible, but I’d obviously never do that.’ Tempting though it might be to present sexual harassment as a black and white issue, the truth was it was a complicated area with shades of grey. Depending on the context things like jokes, compliments, personal questions and physical interactions could all be completely harmless… or could all slip over into sexual harassment. By recognising this and inviting our audience to consider then things were going too far, they would be far more likely to empathise with the work and see themselves within it.

Describe the execution

We created a film that depicted familiar advertising interactions slowly becoming outright sexual harassment. At key points a stark red line interrupted the action to force the viewer to think about when it should have been drawn. In print and digital media we brought to life more scenarios, again interrupting the text with our iconic red line. We then created an open source file of all our campaign assets for any media owner, agency, client or individual to access. The result was a massive amount of free media support from the likes of Campaign, The Drum, digiday, Little Black Book, Marketing Week, Twitter, 8Outdoor, Clear Channel, Outdoor Plus, ITV and Advertising Week Europe. In total the launch generated 12 million impacts, 575K Twitter views of the films and £260K worth of free media.

Describe the results / impact

At the time of writing 171 creative and media agencies have signed up to #timeTo’s code of conduct promising to help eradicate sexual harassment from our industry. And since launch there have been almost 4000 unique visits to the #TimeTo website. That might not sound like a huge amount, but remember there are only 25,000 people working in advertising in the UK (source: IPA), so it’s actually a very high percentage. In June 2019 #timeTo will repeat its survey of the industry, and we hope to see genuine behaviour change reflected in the numbers with less people reporting incidents of sexual harassment over the last 12 months.