The Brief

Hong Kong is facing increasing threats to press freedom. So when Metro Daily came to us for an ad campaign, we convinced them of their duty to do something more important, together. We wanted to alarm people the alarming decline of freedom of speech, and provide a way and call for people to speak freely again without the fear of getting into trouble. The Internet is now the only channel where people can still express themselves freely. Our strategy is to find a way to cleverly channel the honest voices from online to the traditional media to effectively alarm people of the threats to press freedom.

Creative Execution

Our true motive was to give people a lawful channel to express their heartfelt opinions. And we have achieved that successfully by the use of a futuristic theme and an April Fool’s launch. You can’t jail someone over a fictional article on April Fool’s Day, can you? And what’s better than to actually have a news organization to do this, to cleverly provide a lawful channel for people to express themselves to protest against the decline of freedom of speech in Hong Kong.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

2 months before April Fool’s Day, we created a website and mobile site “newsin18yrs.com” and asked people: What will be making news headlines in 18 years? People were invited to write their own stories on things that matter to their hearts, from politics, social issues, the economy, sports to entertainment. We then published the most voted-for stories on the website, word-for-word, in a special edition paper that we distributed to the public on April Fool’s Day.

Results

With self-expression as the only incentive, we received over a thousand articles in just a month, and over 200,000 people visited our website. “It’s a reinvention,” Audrey Eu, Hong Kong Civic Party Leader, on Future Daily. “A disruption,” Claudia Mo, famous media critic, on Future Daily. Not only were we impressed by the number of articles on the site, the contents of the articles were as overwhelming. We received countless articles on topics being constantly silenced in the traditional media, from comments on Taiwan, to the infamous and most censored subject of all times – the June 4th Incident.