The first link is the agency's own channel. This is a case film rather than a commercial, because the work itself was nine trees in a jungle and there was nothing to broadcast. The TED talk is the man who ran it explaining, at length and rather beautifully, how you write to someone who is trying to kill you.
Colombia had been at war with the FARC for close to fifty years. The military had spent decades trying to defeat an enemy it could not find, in terrain that favoured the enemy, and every message the state had ever put out was addressed to "the FARC" as a body: surrender, you cannot win, we are coming.
Lowe SSP3 went and talked to demobilised fighters instead, and found the thing that reframes the entire brief. There is no such thing as a guerrilla. There are only individual people, most of them recruited as teenagers, who are cold, tired, frightened of their own commanders, and who have not seen their mothers in years. And the data had a shape to it: demobilisations spiked around Christmas, every year, without anybody advertising anything. December was already doing the work.
So the target was not an army. It was one homesick person, walking alone at night, on a path the army already knew about.
Put Christmas in the jungle, where they cannot avoid walking past it.
Not a message about the war. Not an argument, an amnesty offer, a threat, or a statistic. A decorated tree, glowing in the dark, three hundred kilometres from anywhere, in a place where a decorated tree has no business being.
Military intelligence supplied the media plan, which is a sentence you do not often get to write. The army knew the infiltration routes the FARC used to move through the jungle. The agency picked nine enormous trees, roughly twenty metres tall, standing on those routes across nine guerrilla-held regions. Special forces went in by helicopter and strung them with thousands of lights.
As reported at the time, the displays were motion-triggered, so a tree sat dark and unremarkable until somebody walked past it, and then lit up in front of them. Underneath each one hung a banner carrying the line. That is the whole media buy. Nine sites, no broadcast, no impressions, an audience measured in the low thousands.
It worked well enough that it became a series. The following December came Rivers of Light, where families of guerrillas sent messages and small gifts downriver inside floating illuminated plastic balls, on the waterways the FARC used to move. Then Operation Bethlehem, then Mother's Voice, which used the fighters' own mothers. Roughly the same idea, rewritten every year for a decade.
The stupid: your client is a defence ministry fighting a fifty year insurgency, and your recommendation is fairy lights. You will spend the budget on nine installations that almost nobody will ever see, in territory controlled by armed men who may well shoot the crew putting them up. There is no reach, no frequency, no reproducible creative asset, and no way to measure exposure, because your audience is hiding from you by profession. You are also proposing to send special forces into a combat zone at night to do the decorating.
The smart: the media placement is the strategy. This is the rare case where a tiny, unmeasurable audience is the correct audience, because you do not need a million impressions, you need one person on one path on one night, and the army already knows which paths those are. The creative works the same way. It never argues, because an argument invites a counter-argument and these are people who have been arguing with the state their whole adult lives. It just puts an object in front of them that carries an entire memory of home, and lets them finish the thought themselves. And the timing is stolen from the data rather than the calendar: December was already when people walked out, so the work does not create a behaviour, it amplifies one that is already happening. That is why the numbers moved.
The steal: when you cannot reach everybody, find out exactly where the one person you need already walks, and put the idea there. A tiny media plan aimed at the right footpath beats a national buy aimed at a demographic.
Most work that wins effectiveness awards does so by being efficient at something ordinary. This one wins by redefining who the audience is, from "an enemy organisation" to "a nineteen year old who misses his mum," and everything else falls out of that single move. It is the clearest proof we know that strategy is mostly the discipline of describing the audience honestly.
We also like that it does not perform emotion at you. There is no music swell, no voiceover telling you how to feel. It is a tree with lights on it and a sentence. The restraint is what makes it land, and it is the hardest thing on this list to hold onto when a client asks you to make the message clearer.
Straight talk, and there is a lot of it on this one. The 331 figure is the number who demobilised while the campaign was running, and the honest reading is that December always produced a spike, so the campaign's real claim is the increase on the previous December rather than the total. The IPA Effectiveness paper is the strongest evidence here, because effectiveness papers are audited and marked by people whose job is to disbelieve you, and it carried the Grand Prix. Note also that this ran on nine sites for a few weeks, so "the campaign caused it" is doing some work that no jungle-based control group will ever verify.
The larger point, which we are not going to skip. This is state military communication for the Colombian armed forces, which is a client with a serious record. Colombia's transitional justice tribunal, the JEP, has found that at least 6,402 civilians were killed by the security forces between 2002 and 2008 and falsely presented as guerrilla casualties, the "false positives" scandal, and later findings put the wider figure higher still. That is the same institution, in overlapping years, as the one that hung the lights. We think the idea is brilliant and we think it is worth studying. Both of those can be true while the client's hands are not clean, and pretending otherwise would be the sort of thing this newsletter exists to avoid.
Client: Colombian Ministry of Defence, Programme of Humanitarian Attention to the Demobilised
Agency: Lowe SSP3, Bogotá, now MullenLowe SSP3
Creative lead: José Miguel Sokoloff, president and chief creative officer, who led the demobilisation work across the whole decade
Media plan: Colombian military intelligence, supplying the infiltration routes
Ran: December 2010, followed by Rivers of Light in 2011, Operation Bethlehem in 2012 and Mother's Voice in 2013
Individual art director and copywriter credits for the original 2010 operation were not published in any source we could verify, so we have not guessed at them.
Campaign, the IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix
Actipedia, the mechanic and the banner wording
Ad Age, the trees and the follow-up operations
Cooper Hewitt, Designing Peace, on the full series
BBC, the JEP finding on the false positives killings