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Left Behind

Crisis

Issue 6 | July 2008

Agency

WWAV Rapp Collins

Creative Team

Chris Coulson, Amy Hornett, Magnus Thorne, Paul Turner

Production Team

Oscar Wilson - Illustrator

Other Credits

Barney Cockerell and Nick Platt – Creative Directors;Emma Crean – Account Director

Date

December 2007

Background

Homelessness is a big problem in the UK - especially in London. Crisis, the homeless charity, were really only known for their work at Christmas with their shelters and retraining centres. After Christmas they tended to drop off the radar. They needed to remind people that the problem of homelessness hadn’t gone away, even after the ‘Crisis at Christmas’ centres had closed up shop and the homeless people had moved on.

Idea

To make sure homelessness continued to get noticed, WWAV Rapp Collins’ idea was to put homeless people on the streets where they could be seen. They commissioned the illustrator Oscar Wilson to create a life-sized typographical homeless person. The words that formed the crouching person spelt out the message: 'Most homeless people have moved on, but their problems haven’t gone away'. The agency wanted the freedom to put the homeless person right there on the streets, on walls and in doorways and alleys – normal media just wasn’t appropriate. So they used a technique called ‘Reverse Graffiti’, to clean off areas of dirty brickwork and concrete around the city, under bridges, in doorways, by cash machines and around tube stations.

The reverse graffiti technique meant that the tagging was legal and, importantly for a charity, free of media costs. It was also very relevant to the message and helped demonstrate Crisis’ commitment to cleaning up the streets and getting homeless people back on their feet. The design featured a URL which took you through to the Crisis microsite, where people could find out more. At time of going to press, all of the tagged sites around the city were still intact and reminding people on a daily basis that homelessness hasn’t gone away.

Results

Not yet available.

Target Audience

City workers, visitors and residents of central London.

Size

15 sites around London.

Our Thoughts

It's a neat idea but it's not big enough to get much PR coverage. Which means doing it on 15 'sites' is too few. The agency should write this off as experience and this year, from December 1st onwards, get out there stencilling. SH

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