Buy a voice – for freedom of speech
PEN Sweden
Issue 42 | March 2017
Agency
DDB Stockholm
Creative Team
Copywriter/Creative Petter Dixelius Creative Directors Olle Langseth Fredrik Simonsson Account Manager Therese Loodin Design Director Jojo Brännström Finance Roshanak Fatahian Graphic Designer Petter Mollberg Fagring
Production Team
Sound Production Flickorna Larsson Film Production House DoP Bo Pärletun Editors August Håkansson Eskil Lundberg
Date
December 2016 - ongoing
Background
PEN International was a charity established to promote the role of literature in cross-cultural understanding and to be a voice for writers who were attacked, imprisoned and even killed for their views.
They were looking for ways to spread awareness of the stories of many contemporary writers who are being persecuted.
Idea
Röster was Sweden's largest voice-casting and production company responsible for providing voice-over artists for TV, radio and online.
When they were contacted by agencies or production companies, they sent out voice samples. These samples were usually spoof ads or even pure nonsense, which creatives spent hours listening to as they searched for exactly the right voice for the job.
Sample by sample, the voice-overs replaced their nonsense demos with recordings in which they read texts written by persecuted writers around the world.
Every voice bought secured a donation of 250SEK (€26) to PEN.
In this way, while brands rarely dared to take a stand when it came to freedom of speech, their advertising messages could make a difference.
Results
The initiative has just been launched. Other PEN centers now want to deploy it in their markets.
Our Thoughts
For me this is as brilliant a media innovation as ‘Donate the Bars’, which was the 10th most awarded idea in the world in 2016 (The Big Won report, pages 4-9).
Here’s someone who has taken a medium that hasn’t changed in decades, the traditional demo-tape, and given it a completely new spin.
Every creative person had a chance to do something new every time he/ she listened to a tape but no-one did. Until now. I take my hat off to whoever it is behind this idea (Petter Dixelius?) opening up an unexpected window on the plight of persecuted writers.
There is a lovely irony in risk-averse brands unwittingly helping victims of political oppression and it is flattering that PEN has reached out to lowly copywriters to talk about the serious issues affecting serious writers. But I suspect that as a target audience, advertising creatives have neither the money nor the influence to do much to really help.