What it had to solve
Raise awareness of the children who witness and experience domestic violence, and drive donations to Refuge over Christmas.
The idea
Make a film that looks like the happy home videos filling Facebook at Christmas, with an unsettling argument playing out in the background.
How it works
BBH made a short film directed by Sing J Lee at Partizan. A child is filmed by her older sister happily unwrapping gifts under the tree while the children's mother and father argue behind them. It launched on Christmas Eve under #givethemrefuge, tightly targeted to the Facebook feeds of 2.1M UK parents of children under 12, with Facebook gifting all the media space.
What it did
Early results: traffic to refuge.org.uk from Facebook rose over 1,000%, donations rose 89% and the number of donors almost doubled. The film was viewed more than 1.5M times and shared over 200,000 times.
Background
Refuge, England's national domestic violence charity, launched a Christmas campaign with BBH and Facebook about the children who are often the forgotten victims of domestic violence. The film was fictional, but based on what the charity says is a daily reality for the 750,000 children living with domestic violence in the UK every year.
Instead of a conventional charity film, BBH imitated what fills Facebook at Christmas: a child unwrapping presents, filmed by her sister. Only in the background does the parents' argument become clear. Refuge's chief executive Sandra Horley said that for many 25 December was like any other day, filled with fear and uncertainty, and that two thirds of Refuge's residents on any given day are children.
Why it lands
Placing it in parents' own feeds put the story where such happy scenes normally appear.
The hidden background argument asks viewers to notice what children witness.
Free media from Facebook meant the whole donation drive reached the target group at no cost.
What you can take
An ad that copies the look of a feed's happiest content makes the hidden detail the thing nobody scrolls past.
Since then
The LBB report, published on 7 January 2016, describes these as early results. Refuge's chief executive thanked the public for sharing and donating to support its services.
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