Defining brands, helping sell stuff and hyping cultures is all well and good, but doing this sort of do-good thing is the cherry on top — made shinier by the national award we won for it.

(Had to mention the award quick in case the following is TL;DR.)

71% of women have experienced sexual harassment in a public place in the UK.

Bystanders might see it happening and not know what to do. Maybe they’ll make the situation worse or get punched in the face?

Safer Exeter set up free classes to educate people on how they can effectively assess and intervene in such situations, and they chose us to create the campaign to get good folks to sign up for it.

I came up with the concept, sold it in, wrote the words, designed and produced everything.

Wanting to grab people’s attention and make them think, I created a series of typographically impactful visuals with arresting words that might start an intervention, designed to be unclear what the context was until you read the smaller print. That enlightened, shocked, informed and inspired people to sign up via a QR code.

Adaptations appeared in the street, buses, gyms, cinemas, car parks and of course the usual socials, and animated versions were used on screens.

Safer Exeter saw their courses four-times oversubscribed so they arranged more. Nice.

Other versions were “Don’t be that guy”, “Lads, leave her alone”, “Come on, let’s go” and “Did you see that? Let’s do something”.

It won the UK’s Independent Agency Awards “Best Purpose-Led Campaign” award and a couple of other smaller ones.

If this helped one woman, that’s reward enough for me.

[ For Safer Exeter / Program ]