Produced for World Vision, the print and outdoor campaign, features brightly-illustrated visuals, tapping into familiar children’s games like ‘join-the-dots’ and a maze. The campaign will run on outdoor sites, in inflight media and at popular tourist spots.
“World Vision has been fighting this kind of exploitation for years,” said Lawrence Valencia, an art director at BatesAsia 141 Cambodia. “We spent hours looking at case studies. One insight we found was that most paedophiles think the country is still lawless and that their crimes are risk-free. Potential offenders feel emboldened by the anonymity of being away from their home country - they do things here they wouldn’t do at home.
“We developed long-copy ads to challenge child sex tourists’ feelings of complacency and tap into the fear of everybody back home finding out what they’ve done.”
Over a million visitors come to Cambodia each year. Currently, an estimated 30,000 children are engaged in the child sex tourism trade.
A second campaign by the agency, for the German Development Corporation and the Women’s Affairs Ministry, has launched to fight domestic abuse and violence.
The topic, considered taboo in Cambodia, was confronted using TV spots that revealed couples, drawn from real-life case studies, emerging from the shadows to talk about their problems.
Alex Bodman, creative group head for BatesAsia 141 Cambodia, recalled the campaign’s challenges: “The more we researched the issue with the input of our Khmer colleagues, the more we realised just how taboo discussing it was. It’s seen as something that should stay behind closed doors - to discuss a particular family’s problem is to bring them shame.”
Bodman said the message to women was very simple: there’s no shame in protecting themselves. “To talk to men, we tapped into the insight of ‘face’ in Khmer culture. For a Cambodian man to lose his temper or cool is seen as an embarrassment. We point out that this should extend into the home,” he explained.
The campaign was created on a budget of less than US$3,000. It will run until the end of April.
