O&M: #TakeAction with Live Amnesty Campaign

Following Donald Trump’s #MuslimBan last week – an executive order passed to halt the entry of refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries into America – all attention is even more focussed on the plight of refugees.

Tapping into this is Ogilvy & Mather London, who are connecting refugees based in Kenyan and Lebanese camps with Twitter users, in a bid to humanise them and share their stories.

Almost 10,000 tweets are released daily in support of the crisis, so Amnesty International decided to transform this virtual support into action and send a team to Kenya and Lebanon to film real refugee stories in response to every tweet about the crisis – a chance for refugees to speak for themselves and thank tweeters for their support.

The #TakeAction campaign strives to get the tweeter to sign a global petition which will be presented to UN secretary general António Guterres on Feb 6 and encourage him to resolve the ongoing global refugee crisis.

Launched today, the campaign will run until Friday. So get tweeting and follow #TakeAction to see the team's amazing work.

The first tweeted response has just been uploaded now from Kenya's Kakuma camp.

Hi @hehju, Leila in Kenya's Kakuma camp has replied to your tweet on child refugees #TakeAction https://t.co/fHtoxkAmGc pic.twitter.com/GLay53pzaE
— AmnestyInternational (@amnesty) January 31, 2017

shots caught up with O&M’s CSO Kev Chesters and CCO Mick Mahoney (below) to find out how the idea came about and the logistics needed to put it into practice.

Kev Chesters; Ogilvy + Mather's CSO:

What was the brief that you received from Amnesty?

For over fifty years, Amnesty has been on a mission to get the people of the world to take injustice personally. This year, their main focus is – naturally – how to tackle the the greatest refugee challenge since the second world war. Our brief was simple – how to get more people to take it personally.

How did you set about tackling this brief?

Put simply, all refugees are ordinary people who are facing extraordinary circumstances but it’s impossible for us to imagine what it’s like.

We started with social listening and discovered that there is no shortage of people who sympathise with those facing this challenge. We called them the decent people. The people who would never in a million years side with trolls like Katie Hopkins. It wasn’t hard to find them; the world is full of decent people who feel justifiable outrage at what is happening.

Then we turned to our behavoural scientists in Ogilvy Change to try to explain what might be stopping people turning this outrage into action.

It turns out to be something called the Identifiable Victim Effect. We simply can’t imagine what it is like. Most campaigns try and put you into the shoes of refugees and it isn’t easy for our brains to imagine. So we decided if we can’t put you in their world how could we most effectively bring the refugees into ours?

The campaign is aimed at encouraging people to sign a petition and put pressure on the UN to instigate action. Why did you decide that activating the campaign through social media, & Twitter in particular, was the best approach?

Doing socially relevant campaigns is about generating/joining the conversation bigger than the advertising. The conversation about the biggest crisis to face the world in 70 years is happening in social media.

When we looked into the target audience of young people who were actively posting their opinions about the refugee crisis, it ran into the hundreds of millions – this was no niche audience! And between the two most ubiquitous platforms (FB or Twitter), we found that 96% of the posts/conversations featuring the word “refugee” were happening on Twitter. It was the natural home for a campaign like ‘Outrage is not Enough’ and the place to turn justifiable outrage into concrete action.

How have the current political circumstances affected the campaign’s launch, if at all?

Current circumstances haven’t made refugee suffering any worse or better, but they have made the issue more acute in the media especially since January 20th. This crisis is happening and it’s as much a crisis of empathy as one of economics. It's time decent people took a stand against intolerance and ignorance. We’ve all seen from history what happens when we don’t.

Mick Mahoney; O&M's CCO:

Tell us about the practicalities of realising the campaign; how big are the teams on the ground & what are the logistics of creating content in response to each tweet?

I think it's fair to say, that none of us appreciated the scale and complexity of pulling this campaign off in the early days. We have worked with PR specialists, huge social media listening teams (who have monitored tweets from 04.00 every day of the live week), translators, editors and of course, a huge team from Ogilvy London across all disciplines. About 40 people are involved at any time to facilitate the 'real time' response - from those identifying tweets in London to those translating and latterly sub-titling and to the production team working with Magnum in the actual refugee camps. Upload and download speeds have necessitated exploring all tech solutions to make sure we can turn around our responses as quickly as possible. We've worked with Ogilvy in Nairobi and Beirut to help us maximise our chances of swift responses using local network intel... And Amnesty colleagues in all regions have been onboard, reaching out to media partners and celebrity influencers. It's been a truly global project.

How have you found working with so many different agents within the campaign; photojournalist agency Magnum, Amnesty, refugees & online users.

It's been amazing - Amnesty are an inspirational client to work with, and Magnum could not have been more collaborative and accommodating. We've had a wonderful response from the refugees in the camps - who are all very ordinary people like ourselves in extraordinary circumstances. They, like us, use social media. Our hope is that this campaign will help to motivate people to take the next step in encouraging governments to take their share of the crisis that continues to impact millions of people worldwide.