Sweetie
Joseph Maduma
July 3rd 2014
“We believe that businesses, and creative agencies in particular, should use their talents and resources to make this world a better place.”
The Grand Prix for Good rewards work ineligible to win a Grand Prix in their sections because they are made for charities/not for profit or have charitable or public service messages. This years winner came from Dutch creative agency Lemz Amsterdam for Children’s charity Terre des Hommes.
The real genius of the creativity for this camapaign comes from the fact that it’s not really a ‘campaign’ at all, it’s a solution. Mark Woerde, Strategy director and co-founder LEMZ explains the project:
“In early 2013, we offered to help Terre des Hommes Netherlands when we first learned about this new form of child exploitation that is spreading like an epidemic. Men from rich countries pay children in poor countries to perform sexual acts in front of webcams. We conducted research for nearly a year and we called this crime Webcam Child Sex Tourism (WCST).
WCST happens tens of thousands of times a day, but prior to this campaign, only 6 men had ever been convicted of the crime. We developed a 3D model that looked and moved like a 10-year-old Filipino girl and we called her “Sweetie.” With Sweetie, we went on public chat rooms and interacted with over 20,000 predators. We gathered incriminating evidence and information about them. In two months, we caught in the act and identified 1,000 predators from 71 countries. Governments were urged to act after the world witnessed us handing over our short movie (youtube.com/sweetie), research findings, and the 1,000 names to Interpol.
This campaign put a spotlight on an unknown form of child exploitation and it reached over 1 billion viewers on every continent, putting WCST firmly on the world agenda. As a result, governments are now taking action: policies have been changed, the Philippines National Police announced that WCST is the country’s number one crime, online predators are being arrested based on the evidence we collected, and child victims are being rescued.
We believe that businesses, and creative agencies in particular, should use their talents and resources to make this world a better place. The Sweetie campaign proves that creative agencies can have significant impacts on global problems that may seem to have no relevance to our industry or to our daily lives. We call upon the worldwide creative industry to dedicate more of their creativity and passion to solving the many problems that face humankind; because the power of creativity can provide new solutions and new hope to a world in which deepening crises, growing inequity, and profound injustice are increasingly met with cynicism, apathy, and paralysis. We have an opportunity to forge a better future…and to have fun doing it together.
Sweetie also picked up the prestigious White Pencil and Black Pencil awards at this years D&AD Awards. To find out more and to sign the sign the global petition encourage more governments to adopt pro-active policing policies please visit avaaz.org/wcst.