My face their story
I took part of this campaign as a collaborator for Felipa, a Mexico City based agency known for it’s innovative and award winning ideas to which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees approached with a mission: How can we reach a younger audience to make them conscious of the current refugee situation in the region? Every day, hundreds of people cross the borders of the Central and North American countries looking for a better life. Walking for miles without food, accumulating insomnia and hunger at every step, but above all, accumulating stories. Stories that cannot be told for fear of being recognized. They cannot show their faces to tell their own stories, but we can lend them our voice and face so that the whole world knows them and inspire more people to take action. One of the biggest problems with donations is that the people who are most willing to collaborate with social actions -young people- are also those who have the least money to do so. So proposing a donation to them sounded like something crazy, until now. What if you could donate your voice and your reach to let the refugees’ stories finally be heard, clear, and strong? Their story, your voice, your face.
Video by Felipa Creative Studio
TOOLS USED
SERVICES DELIVERED
CREATIVE DIRECTION
ART DIRECTION
GRAPHIC DESIGN
MY ROLE: As a collaboration with Felipa, I was part of this campaign in the initial conceptualization and execution phase. My mission was to help to turn the client’s briefing into a concept and then to translate that concept visually into a set of graphics.
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UNDERSTANDING THE BRIEFING: We started ideating a concept and an execution following all of the client’s requirements: How to engage young audiences in the regional migration problem? How can we create viral actions to increase donations and social reach?
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INTERNAL RESEARCH: The client delivered a clear briefing, but to go really deep it’s always necessary to run additional research. We pigged into public and private paper’s statics, press publications, and journalistic materials to understand the problem in depth.
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BRAINSTORMING: We spent a long Brainstorming session to discuss the problem, to discuss several concepts and explore different executions. After that we got to a consensus: In Spanish, there is an expression “Doy la cara for él / ella” literally translated into “I’ll show my face for him-her” meaning that you can respond for someone else you trust. “Doy la cara por mi amigo, confío en él, respondo por él” – “I’ll show my face for my friend, I trust him, I can be responsible for his actions”. We decided to use this popular phrase that would resound with our audience and that makes sense with the mission: To give a voice and face to those who don’t have it. The audience can now make a donation by doing what they already are used to: To publish a message showing their face, but this time, they are “donating” their face to those who most stay anonymous.
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VISUAL EXECUTION: Back in the 90’s I was fascinated by a kind of collages that were made out of small photos building a bigger one. When looking for visual ways to depict the concept those collages came to my mind and immediately connected as the perfect execution for this campaign. These people don’t have a face, they don’t have a voice, but we can collectively rebuild their story, their faces, using our own. It’s a face made out of a mosaic of thousands of faces donated to represent them, to finally personify those anonymous stories.
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BIG IDEA: How can we involve a younger audience in spreading the word about the migration situation in the region? Where can we find them? How can we connect with them? The answer was right in front of us: Instagram and TikTok are an infinite scroll of people showing their faces, using filters mostly to have fun. What if we create a filter for good? Felipa created a filter displaying different letters written by actual refugees telling their story, allowing the users to read it out loud to later be published into their feeds to spread the word about the situation and inviting other to do the same.
Thousands of people, including celebrities, took part of the campaign by using the filter. In a second phase. A series of visuals where created with their faces to be used to promote UNHCR mission and to tell the refugees stories.
RESULTS
Over 290k filter impressions.
10.24% Open Rate
Over 8 Million impressions to the whole region.
Press mentions in the main regional communication networks.
Several awards granted to this campain. Including the New York Festivals Gold Award.
