Who: #MeToo and FCB/Six.
What: “Act Too,” a new chapter against sexual violence for the #MeToo movement. It includes an interactive website, murals painted using blockchain (yep, we’ll explain) and a brand advertising campaign.
When & Where: The campaign launched yesterday (Oct. 15), the third anniversary of #MeToo going viral on Twitter. Paid media support is focused on the U.S. and Canada for now.
Why: Tarana Burke started the Me Too movement in 2006, but it really broke through into public consciousness in 2017, when the #MeToo hashtag went ultra-viral. That was helpful in terms of awareness, but to really affect change it has to be more than a hashtag. “Awareness is nothing without action, and that’s what we wanted to convey in our next act,” said Burke. “Today, we all have the chance to write another chapter, and to contribute to everyday activism as simple as joining a march or reading a book.”
How: There are a number of elements to this campaign, but the cornerstone is an interactive website—which they are calling an “action hub”—that provides suggestions for real actions people can take to combat sexual violence. There are more than 1,000 options, ranging from “micro actions” like watching an educational video or reading a book, to bigger, more formal contributions like donating to a cause or volunteering.
The site includes a powerful recommendation engine to suggest actions for each person. Not every act on the site will be relevant to every person, said FCB/Six chief creative officer Ian Mackenzie. If you recommend the right actions to the right individual, they are much more likely to act, he said.
What about blockchain? Most of the stories about #MeToo are about powerful men being exposed as predators, explained Mackenzie. “A story of a powerful man being taken down probably sells more clicks on a news website than the story of a survivor or an activist,” he said.
They wanted to find “a new way to record the stories and the activities of this movement in a way that couldn’t be altered or erased by traditional power structures.” Blockchain technology is perfect for this, since it records information in a way that is both public and permanent. Every act registered through the site is added to the blockchain, so that a new story starts to be written about the the people—the activists and survivors—who are taking action against sexual violence.
“We had this idea that if I could hold out a button and say ‘If you press this button you can make a permanent mark on the history of the #MeToo movement,’ we always thought that was a compelling story,” said Mackenzie.
“When you take action, you help bring each of those moments to life and you become part of the movement’s history,” said FCB/Six global president Andrea Cook in a release. “Through a novel application of blockchain for activism, FCB/Six wanted to create a living, irrefutable record of the survivors and allies that can never be erased.”
FCB/Six has enjoyed huge success in recent years with groundbreaking, data-driven creative ideas for clients including PFLAG (“Destination Pride”) and Black and Abroad (“Go Back to Africa”).
And the murals? As each act is added to the blockchain, it generates a 64-character share ID. Each of those IDs is converted into a pixel that is added to a 1,600-pixel mural of important moments in the fight against sexual violence. As more acts are completed and more pixels generated, more murals will be created (you can see one of the murals top right, one of the 64-character pixels below, and more of the murals here).
In a way this is about the past, present and future of the story of the struggle against sexual violence, said Mackenzie. Every action taken now (present) is converted to a permanent digital record (future), and then converted back into a pixel that is added to murals depicting important historical moments in the long struggle against sexual violence (past).
The advertising: The murals can be shared through social and will run as digital outdoor. Programmatic digital will be used to target individuals with action recommendations generated by the site’s recommendation engine, or contextually based on the content they are consuming.
The anchor creative is an anthemic 60-second spot featuring Burke telling the story of #MeToo and explaining how the next chapter will be told using Act Too.
Quote “Through ‘me too.’ Act Too, the history of this movement will be written by the activists themselves, and recorded for posterity to a permanent archive on a public blockchain so that their voices can never be altered, disputed or erased.” —Me Too founder Tarana Burke.
