WarOnCovid19 Fabrica Activate Their Collective
Last month as the impact of the Covid19 spread, we asked our ‘Collective’ who was stepping up and producing cut-through public service messaging? Dave Birss, in London, connected us to James Keet and Jason Hodson and agreed to help get their posters out of home distribution.
Within 12 hours we’d connected with John Laramie, Founder of Project X about his innovative OOH network. Three days later the posters were live on many London out of home sites.
The result validated our vision of networks working for the collective good, in a fast, agile, ego-less way.
James and Jason, a UK creative duo, had created a set of public health information posters based on posters from the first and second world wars. The campaign – called “WarOnCovid19” – was created to give people clear instructions about what to do in the crisis. They came up with the idea after they noticed people still weren’t taking social distancing seriously, and how it felt like more needed to be done to protect the efforts of the health services. They are modern takes on old war posters because those posters were incredibly effective at persuading people to behave in certain ways.
The suite of 10 ads include “Loo roll” which aims to make people think about whether they need that extra pack of toilet rolls, “Nurses” which encourages people to leave food on the shelves for health workers and “Daddy” which invokes a classic wartime ad to encourage people to stay in.
All of the ads are currently running in digital out-of-home on hundreds of sites around London, after WarOnCovid19 was spotted by New York based agency Fabrica Collective on LinkedIn and founder Mark Fallows asked PJX Media founder John Laramie to donate media space. All of the donated space has helped spread the message of social distancing and thinking of others in the crisis.
The posters have also been widely shared on social media. So far they’ve been shared by over 30 influencers including @lifewithivycoco @daniellepeazer @zoehardman @adjodudu and @bowel babe and WarOnCovid19 have been interviewed by NowThis.
Here’s a quote from James and Jason on why they waged War On Covid-19:
“The world is in a fight for its life. So we’ve put our skills to good use and created a set of social posters to give people clear instructions about what to do in the crisis. They’re based on old war posters because those posters were incredibly effective at communicating with the public, and we are at war with this virus. They’ll only help if they’re seen, so we’ve made them free to download and share across any format. Together we can win the #WarOnCovid19.”