Domestic violence affects one in four women. Yet it goes unnoticed. We wanted to expose this issue and do something about it. This is the story of how we did exactly that, despite zero production or media budget.

If you want to stop a man beating his wife, there are two approaches advertising typically takes: either target him to get him to stop or target her to get her to seek help.

But we found a third approach. Target the people around the victims: the people turning a blind eye to the problem. We wanted to confront society’s tacit acceptance of the issue and show people that by noticing it they could change it.

This insight led to an achingly simple poster idea: we would let the public ‘heal’ a battered woman just by looking at her. Using the latest facial-recognition technology, we would put the public in control, giving them the power to change a battered woman’s fate.

The poster would first show a woman who was beaten and bruised. But when people stopped and noticed, she would start to heal. And the more people who looked, the more she would recover.

We partnered with the charity Women’s Aid and won a bounty of free interactive outdoor media to make this idea possible.

The resulting campaign captured the public’s imagination. Journalists from around the world covered the story, reaching over 326 million people.

We had shown the value in not turning a blind eye to domestic violence.

We used interactive digital outdoor to bring this idea to life. Using facial-recognition technology that determined exactly how many people were looking towards the poster, we put the public in control.

The screen showed a woman who was beaten and bruised. For as long as people walked by and ignored her, she remained the same. But, by taking notice of the problem, a passer-by could heal her bruises. The more people who looked, the more she recovered.

As passers-by looked, their faces were registered on a video feed and added to a progress bar below the image, showing their contribution.

The campaign started off as a sketch on a scrap of paper with no money or media to make it happen. But, from these humble origins, we won over a client and won a bounty of free media to make it happen.

The results were phenomenal. The average time people spent looking at the posters was 349% higher than the previous average measured across the same sites.

Journalists and news crews from 20 countries covered the campaign, reaching 326.9 million people. People who heard about it took to social media in droves, with 86.7 million impressions on Twitter alone.