BACKGROUND:

On 24th of February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine and started a full-scale war. Ukraine started to respond immediately, but there was the whole world that must react fast.

Governments usually act slowly. So we decided to push global corporations to adopt decisions of quitting Russia and banning business with an aggressor fast.

CREATIVE IDEA, STRATEGY:

The idea was to show how war transforms commercial taglines into bloody and aggressive slogans. Ruins and damages to civilians is not a suitable background to make money.

EXECUTION:

We decided to target and appeal to the brands marketing teams with the only one demand – to ban russia. The idea was to take the brand’s slogan and to slightly change its text, so the context would be relevant to the war in Ukraine and russian horrible actions and use real war photography as background.

We made a list of the international companies and brands operating in russia and refusing to exit. Our main communication channel was Instagram stories and publications, as it is easy to get to corporate PR and marketing monitoring just by using @corporate pages tags and locations.

RESULTS:

We started with immediate sound success with Shell, who bought russian oil in early March, but just in 3d day of the campaign made a statement on quitting russia and later announced the absolute closing of operations. During 70 days of war we worked on 100 corporations, creating visuals with the same ban russia appeal. Visuals not just delivered visuals and messages to corporate headquarters, but became viral as many people shared them. Different companies, including media, asked us to share our database of visuals, so they could post them on various social media channels.
As of May 9th 2022, almost 1,000 companies have stopped operating in russia. It is not just hitting the russian economy, but is a great signal that the corporate world will not tolerate russian invasion of Ukraine. And we are not planning to stop, until every global brand or company will simply Ban Russia.