We turned Chicago’s flag, an historical point of pride for the city, into a violent truth to inspire action against gun violence. The posters would then appear at exact locations where people were gunned down within hours of an incident.

By targeting the streets, we drove Chicago youth to musicvsgunviolence.com where the could use music as a weapon against the these brutal killings in Chicago.

The central point of this design is Chicago’s city flag. This iconic flag with its two blue bars and four red stars are well known to all Chicagoans as a point of pride for the city. This design takes that flag and replaces the four stars with four ragged bullet holes - a representation of the gun violence that is tearing our city apart.

This modified flag is printed on simple white t-shirts worn by real Chicago residents. Their expressions in the portraits as they stare directly out from the posters convey the severity of the problem. The flag is highlighted with color within the black and white portraits.

These portraits are tightly cropped and presented without further distraction. With every set of portraits, we also placed a simple typographic poster directing viewers to MusicVsGunViolence.com to lend their voices to the cause.

The posters drove our target audience to “Put The Guns Down”, an interactive music video that invited Chicago youth to add a unique 20-second verse against gun violence.

Within days, the track grew from 4 minutes to over 2 hours long, resulting in coverage from major music publications like Rolling Stone, Billboard & Spin as well as national news outlets such as FOX, ABC and CNBC.

With a media budget of $0, these posters helped us achieve over 530 million earned impressions and 127 total earned placements with an average time of 4 minutes and 18 seconds spent on musicvsgunviolence.com.

The result was more powerful than a like or a share, it was a cry for peace that won’t end until the gun violence does.