Three ads from the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and ACNUR send a message for and in behalf of the world’s refugees via visuals that are so heavily and beautifully photoshopped that one can no longer feel the ugliness of the raging social malaise upon which the public awareness campaign is based.

The advertising campaign asks the question: Would you like to have the same problems refugees have? The ads bear the explicit message via the copy: ‘Refugees would like to have the same problems you have.’ The situations depicted are those seemingly common incidents and issues confronted by normal people in normal lives. By harping on this commonplace normality, the ads suggest that refugees are not normal people who lead normal lives.

Well, refugees are not normal beings in normal situations, leading normal everyday lives. They are transient souls with no permanent address and incomplete lives. However, the ads created by Young & Rubicam in Buenos Aires, Argentina with Hernán Damilano as creative director, Gustavo Sucri as art director, and Francisco Ferro as copywriter fail to bridge the emotive connection between normality and abnormality with illustrated comic-book
renditions of refugee poverty that look so far-removed from the ugliness of refugee reality.

This is a case of prettifying the horrors of life with self-satisfying penchant for visual art, a stupid mistake made by advertising creative folks who are so in love with medium that they forget the message – all in all, a failure of social awareness campaign.

Via osocio