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5 Feet of Fury

Kathy Shaidle's blog. Est. 2000

Inside the Save Darfur ad campaign

September 27, 2007 By admin

“Work for the Save Darfur Coalition was created by GMMB (an ‘issue agency’), which swelled the number of e-activists for the non-profit to over 1 million just last July.

“David Mitchell of the Save Darfur Coalition shared some rules he discovered over the course of the campaign:

* “People want to see evidence: dead bodies, masked raids, murders. Unfortunately, ‘Despots don’t call in the photographers when they’re about to execute mass numbers of people,’ says Mitchell.
* “You can’t make genocide ads that look like other ads about issues in Africa (like Save the Children ads, par exemple). People don’t pay attention to them.

* “People want to know who the bad guy is. That’s not easy. Who do you blame? Investment houses? Omar al-Bashir? George-fucking-Bush?

* “There are standards for taste and appropriateness: If you want something to appear in The New York Times, you can’t throw in the dead bodies people want to see. There are also specifications for Pan-Arabic publications regarding issues like rape and murder.

“Campaign foci:

* “Prior to the campaign, most people didn’t know what or where Darfur was. First-person accounts about rape, torture, murder, various horrors were used, and often read out loud by American suburbanites in the ad work, to make the issue more personal.

* “Most muslims didn’t know this was muslim on muslim [sic] violence. Had to demonstrate this in a culturally sensitive way.

* “Darfur was compared to Palestine, Lebanon — this struck the agency as off-center, but research indicated it would drive the point home.”

* “Divestment efforts — the campaign waged war against Fidelity, which ended up selling over 90 percent of its petro China interests.”

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