This entry is about Colombia’s 60 years of struggle against the world’s oldest guerrilla group, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. 8,000 guerrillas are in action, committing a terrorist act on average once every 3 days.We were asked to create an idea to demobilise them. To invite them to recover their life, their freedom.Delivering demobilisation messages to the guerrillas is a very difficult task. The remaining guerrillas are hard-core fanatics. They eschew conventional media in the main and connecting with them is fraught with danger and risk.

Ground-breaking insight from group sessions and interviews revealed that Christmas time is the most sensitive and emotional period for guerrillas. Consequently we created OPERATION CHRISTMAS: 2 professional anti-guerrilla contingents, 2,000 LED lights, and 2 Black Hawk helicopters travelled into the jungle to find and cover giant trees (75 feet tall) with Christmas lights. Placed alongside the guerrillas strategic walking paths, the lights would come on when they approached, with banners exhorting them to lay down their arms becoming visible too:‘If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home. Demobilise. At Christmas everything is possible’.The powerful and timely messaging encouraged 331 FARC guerrillas to demobilise and re-enter society - a 30% uplift on the previous year.The year on year reduction in guerrilla numbers is estimated to return over $3.4m to Colombian government through tax receipts, a $11.35 return on marketing investment. At a wider level, the benefits to Colombian society and the economy through a reduction in FARC’s illegal ‘fund raising’ is estimated to be in excess of $1.9 million in the first year alone.

And looking even more broadly, the innovative concept and its impact gained huge awareness, both within Colombia and internationally. The idea has helped to change the context for the ongoing conflict, helping to humanise the conflict and its combatants, making an end to the struggle all the more hopeful.This paper demonstrates that you can use communications to achieve the impossible:1.Through real understanding of your audience and by making a genuine connection, in this case identifying and utilising the emotional connection guerrillas make with Christmas; and 2.By delivering a remarkable and unconventional creative solution to bring Christmas to the jungle by putting lights on trees.Beyond anything else, this campaign has demonstrated how communications can act as a powerful yet fundamentally peaceful weapon in war.