STICHTING WILSKRACHT: THE STORY OF JESSICA STEVENS

Credits & Description:

Category: Charities, Public Health & Safety, Public Awareness Messages

Advertiser: STICHTING WILSKRACHT

Product/Service: DOMESTIC ABUSE AWARENESS

Agency: NEW MESSAGE

Date of First Appearance: Oct 1 2009 12:00AM

Entrant Company: NEW MESSAGE, Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS

Creative Director: Hugo Rütter (New Message)

Creative Director: Lennart Wienecke (New Message)

Art Director: Chris Sant (New Message)

Copywriter: Dieuwer Bulthuis (New Message)

Account Manager: Catherine Dijkstra (New Message)

Media placement: Twitter Communication - Twitter - October 2009

Media placement: PR - New Message - December 2009



Results and Effectiveness

We asked several Dutch celebrities to dedicate one Tweet to Jessica’s story. This way we reached tens of thousands of people on Twitter alone. Furthermore, Jessica’s story stirred up a discussion among her followers, since the whole experience was quite confronting for them. Apart from this, several news media picked up on the campaign, broadening the audience reached to potentially hundreds of thousands of people. The Willpower Foundation was invited for several interviews and was able to tell their story over and over again.



Creative Execution

We decided to use Twitter, since this medium lets one communicate intensively with an enormous social circle of friends, business contacts, family or just general surfers on the web. We let a young woman named Jessica Stevens open an account on Twitter. She tweets about the fun things in her life on a daily basis. Within months Jessica has thousands of followers. After a while she falls in love. She even moves in with her new boyfriend. Weeks later however, he starts getting violent. She shares these sad episodes with her followers as well. When Jessica finally ends up in the hospital with a broken collar bone, we reveal that she is not a real person, but that her story is very real and happening every day. We finally communicate that when one notices domestic violence, the Willpower Foundation can assist with practical advice and actual help.



Insights, Strategy & the Idea

One in every four women in the Netherlands is subject to domestic violence. People in the victim’s social circle often notice that there is something wrong, but no action is taken in most cases. The Willpower Foundation’s (Stichting Wilskracht in Dutch) goal is to create awareness for this problem. Additionally, the foundation wants to bring the practical help it can offer when domestic violence occurs to the attention of both victims and their social circle. We felt that the most impactful way to communicate this would be by confronting the target audience with a (simulated) social situation in which domestic violence occurs.