Words Can Be Weapons
Centre for Psychological Research, Shenyang
Issue 31 | June 2014
Agency
Ogilvy & Mather, Beijing
Creative Team
Creative Directors Graham Fink Juggi Ramakrishnan Wilson Chow Doug Schiff Xingsheng Qi Designers Yong Xie Copywriters GuiLin Bo Chuyu Li Juggi Ramakrishnan Wilson Chow Art Directors Xingsheng Qi Xiaodong Xiao Lei Fu Kaixin Li Yong Xie Fei Wang Soonguan Poh
Production Team
Video Editor Morris Ku Creative Technologist Eric Wu Innovative Digital Planners/producers Rita Yang Quetina Yang Web Designer Jason Wee Didi Shao Sisi Xing Film Producer Jing Li Social Media Leads Jeremy Webb Bob Wang Content and KOL Manager Ben Xu Platform Technical Support Frank Chen Outdoor Production Supervisor Jinfeng Ding 3D Designers Yu Guo Xing Wan Tongxue Wang Wanqiu Lin Animation Designer Zheng Sun Software Motion Designer Lei Zhang Music Massive Music Kaiser Sound Studio, Shanghai
Other Credits
Sisi Wu Lisa Lee Tim Zhang Jerrow Ai
Date
March 2014
Background
The Centre for Psychological Research, Shenyang, was a government body concerned about the rise of juvenile crime. Their studies had shown a strong link between juvenile crime and childhood emotional abuse. Their psychologists believed that children subjected to verbal abuse could suffer from even more serious psychiatric problems in later life than children subjected to physical violence. Their brief was to get the parents and teachers of Shenyang to take verbal abuse seriously, and understand that it could have serious consequences for their children in later life.
Idea
Six juvenile delinquents, all male, between the ages of 16 and 18, were recruited from the Shenyang Detention Centre and asked to narrate their stories. These boys had been detained for crimes ranging from murder to causing grievous bodily harm.
The words that had been used to abuse these young men during childhood were transformed by artists into the same weapons they had used when committing their crimes.
One young man was repeatedly called a moron when he was young. The word was fashioned into a gun, like the gun he had used to kill a man.
The Chinese characters 'Go away and die', which one child had had thrown at him by his father, helped create a knife.
(Made of nickel-plated steel, to actual size, they looked and felt like real weapons but, of course, had no functional capability and could not be used.)
Digital versions of the weapons were also made for use on interactive touchscreens.
The word-weapons were shown at a two-day public exhibition in March in Shenyang. Over 600 people took part in the event directly and interacted with the weapons. The event was covered by local TV channels.
Both the website www.wordscanbeweapons.com and Wechat included a helpline for those who needed to talk to counsellors about emotional abuse.
Results
326 calls were made to the campaign helpline in the first few weeks.
The campaign's Weibo page has resulted in over 181,000 impressions in the first month.
Our Thoughts
On Pages 102-3, I ask the question, ‘Is advertising art?’ Whatever your thoughts are, you have to agree that this idea is beautifully artful. Taking the Chinese characters that make up the abusive words often flung at young kids and then tooling them into puzzle pieces which together formed a knife, a gun, a sword – that required more than a nice idea, it needed incredible craftsman skills to make it work.
The feel, the weight of the pieces in the hand – that’s what would have made the contrast between the beauty of the object you were holding and the horror of the story behind it all the more powerful.
No doubt many parents would have looked at themselves as they looked at the weapons and would have found themselves wanting. This one did.