London Mayor's Office
Gender-based violence (GBV) in the UK has seen troubling trends over the past decade. The prevalence of domestic abuse and related crimes remains high. For example, police data show over 1.6 million women in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse annually in recent years.
Domestic abuse-related incidents, while slightly decreasing post-pandemic, have been consistently high, with over 910,000 incidents recorded in 2022. This represents a 7.7% increase compared to the previous year.
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It captured the Medias Attention
In the UK, it has seemed like one gender-based violence story after another for the last decade – and, disturbingly, its getting more and more frequent. In this time, there was a handful of stories that attained huge media coverage and UK-wide attention.
Among these where the murders of Sarah Everard (2021), Sabina Nessa (2021), Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry (2020), Gracie Spinks (2021) and Zara Aleena (2022).
Our Creative Solution
There are a number of ways we could have tried to aid this issue
- but a radical problem needed a radical solution.
Find the heart of the campaign in the victims of GBV
Immortalise victims of GBV into an interactive avatar
Give that avatar the ability to speak for victims of GBV
The avatar engages our audience and change hearts and minds
Finding the heart of the campaign
In the years leading up to this work, hundreds of women had been killed as the result of gender-based violence. One case in particular that captured the medias attention – the murder of Ellie - who was stabbed after she ended her relationship of three months. Since her death, Ellies parents have been tirelessly campaigning for changes to the law to better protect women. The idea would be to work with the families of Ellie and other victims to gather the digital data left behind after their deaths.
In today's world, when we die, we leave much of ourselves behind. Our personalities, beliefs, and tone of voice continue to exist in digital form... so does Ellies.
She lives on through her social media profiles, browser histories, and his extensive digital footprint. Recent advances in artificial intelligence enabled us to take this data and turn it into an avatar – an immortal digital version of Ellie that continues to grow and learn as she discovers new information.
This extraordinary process is called Augmented Eternity.
Creating the campaigns avatar
We would bring our GBV avatar to life using metahuman technology as a representative example of a young woman in our sample age group – not an exact copy of any individual victims – for many different reasons.
Building a voice
that speaks volumes
We can create a passable metahuman avatar using the Unreal Engine, but her physical form is meaningless if she doesn’t communicate like a real person. So we would take all that digital data and use it to create a custom GPT – a learning language model that speaks just like a real person.
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Meet Amanda: The avatar of GBV victims
When built, this augmented eternity metahuman avatar would engage with young adults about gender-based violence in a straight-forward, down-to-earth manner, using lingo, slang and insider knowledge prevalent in the demographic.
Because she is a young woman (albeit in digital form) Ellie can help advise affected youth on how to communicate with others in a peaceful way that resonates with them.
Engage
Where she appears, the audience could engage with Amanda in an incredibly straight forward way, with few barriers to entry. You could drop into a conversation with her in as little as 20 seconds on platforms like snapchat and her own dedicated microsite.
CAMPAIGN PHASE
CAMPAIGN PHASE
Converse
Conversations with Amanda are dynamic and ever changing thanks to her custom GPT, which responds using the real victims own data and lived experiences.
The GPT is custom trained to point audiences towards self-help, therapy and self-defence resources.
CAMPAIGN PHASE
Capture attention
Amanda really comes into her own when combined with out-of-home advertising that has been selected through contextual relevance. OOH sites are chosen based on their proximity to real gender-based violence crimes.
CAMPAIGN PHASE
Call Out the Perpetrators
Extensive media planning expertise, data science and insights from focus groups determined there were several places where Amanda could appear online – places where we could take the violence against women conversation to the most affected groups.
This, coupled with an extraordinarily generous media buy from Google ensured that Amanda had a tangible presence alongside violence-glorifying content like Drill music videos and Andrew Tate -these were placements that brands wouldn't touch but were perfect for Ellie.
FUTURE PHASES
An Amanda for every
part of the UK
We could create a series of geo-specific avatars which would tap into local sentiment, cultural backgrounds, politics etc to create even more personalised messages and talk more young people out of committing violence against women.
Hold up a sec!
Great idea and execution, but why isn't this campaign out in the world making a difference?
The Mayor’s office loved the campaign, purchased the concept, then shelved it. Instead, they rolled out a paint-by-numbers campaign that proved highly ineffective 😡