Results and Effectiveness

We received coverage worth several million times our modest expenditure in print and online. The Philippine Daily Inquirer received calls, emails, Facebook messages and tweets about the editorial page takeover. The creative effort was discussed on blogs, and written about by columnists from other newspapers. Columnists who participated in our effort even used their columns to talk about our cause.

Creative Execution

We visualized this closed-eyed symbol of fear, and turned it into a symbol of solidarity for the NUJP. For the second anniversary of the Ampatuan Massacre, we took over the editorial spread of the country’s largest newspaper for a week and changed columnists’ pictures to show their eyes shut. A headline explained, “Some people would rather forget what happened in Maguindanao. We’ve closed our eyes to remember.” This unprecedented takeover ran in 1.8 million copies of a newspaper whose editorial spread isn’t open to advertising. In the Philippines, the literacy rate is over 93%. Getting the country’s most influential journalists to close their eyes to what happened in Maguindanao used a relevant medium to confront people in an effective way.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

November 23, 2009. 58 people, 32 of them journalists, were gunned down in Southern Philippines in broad daylight. This is the single deadliest attack on journalists in the history of the world. Two years after the Maguindanao Massacre, not a single conviction has been made. In a climate of fear, people choose to see no evil. People are scared, they choose to turn a blind eye to the massacre, and the men behind it are more empowered. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) needed to make people remember, and face the gravity of the matter.