2013 Silver Best Media Strategy

Client The Royal Borough of Greenwich

How did the campaign make a difference? Using the very shop shutters that had been torn up during the riots to carry a message of social cohesion inverted their meaning. A year on, antisocial behaviour has fallen by 18% in the surrounding area. The shutters remain untouched and residents say their community feels safer.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? In the week following the riots, normality resumed, but there were questions. What possessed people to destroy their own neighbourhoods? What would stop it from happening again? An FMCG mag called The Grocer provided inspiration. The editor asked the Government to relax the planning laws on shop security shutters. The 'broken windows theory' made famous in 1990s by Bill Bratt suggests that small environmental cues have a catalytic effect on crime and anti-social behaviour. One broken window leads to two, through the unconscious assumption that if nobody repairs the window, then the area's effectively lawless. Shutters are a similar cue; they subconsciously bring down our collective psyche. By treating us all like anonymous criminals, they alienate and provoke us. But this campaign used shutters as a media space carrying a message so positive that it inverted the negativity they stood for. Instead of providing a bare physical barrier to entry, the shutters held a message that made them a more powerful, moral barrier.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? What better way to humanise something intimidatingly inhuman than by giving it an innocent human face? This activity placed faces of local babies on the security shutters in areas badly affected by the riots to help encourage people to see their community as a living entity of which they are a part. It's been proven that 'cute' matters to the brain: hidden within are cues of helplessness that make us aware of our responsibility to nurture. Also, by clearly investing money in painting the shutters, the principle of reciprocity suggested this act of generosity would make the shutters and the area worth caring for. And using local children should, according to proximity bias, make locals relate to and care for them.

Results The campaign generated millions of media impressions worldwide. The coverage showed that although the riots had happened right here, this activity had global relevance. The results are tentatively encouraging, with antisocial behaviour immediately reducing by 18%. But more importantly, these 'babies of the borough' are loved. Not only have the shutters not (yet) been vandalised, but shopkeepers and locals have also embraced the idea as their own.