Advertiser: REFUGE
Agency: BBH
Category: Viral Film
Advertising campaign: DONT COVER IT UP
Account Supervisor: Carly Herman
Producer: Colette Boyle @ The Mill
Copywriter: Jack Smedley
Creative Director: Pablo Marques
Director: Wesley Hawes
Sound Design/Arrangement: Factory
Agency Producer: Bryony Dellow
Art Director: George Hackforth Jones
Agency Producer: Jeremy Gleeson
Director: Gary Mccreadie
Advertiser's Supervisor: Lisa King
Executive Creative Director: Nick Gill
Planner: Simon Roberston
Other Credits: Site: Addictive Pixel
Art Director: Stephen Noble
Editing Company: The Mill
Post Production: The Mill
Brief Explanation
Over 65% of women who experience domestic violence keep it hidden, particularly young women. Refuge, Britain’s leading domestic abuse charity, wanted to address this. But with no budget, they were faced with a problem: how do you talk to a notoriously hard to reach audience about a subject they don’t want to discuss?Lauren Luke is a makeup artist whose YouTube channel has over 125 million views, mostly from young women. Thousands of teenage girls tune in every week to take beauty advice from their trusted friend. This made her the perfect figure to deliver a harrowing message to those affected in an intimate, disarming way. Mimicking her YouTube tutorials, we filmed Lauren demonstrating how to cover up the harrowing effects of domestic violence with makeup. Her film was then uploaded to her YouTube channel under the guise of a normal tutorial so as to catch her loyal fan base off guard. To ensure the conversation was completely organic, we relied on the emotive power of the film and not traditional seeding to prompt the spread of our message. Soon young women the world over were openly discussing an issue they’d previously covered up.