The first example is a 2018 example from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), a magazine for professional journalists which is produced by the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the United States presidential election, and one reason for that victory is said to be the spread of damaging fake news about his opponent Hillary Clinton. Two years after the election controversy, prior to the midterm elections of 2018 that would measure the public’s opinion on President Trump’s record, CJR created the Fake Newsstand, believing the time was right to stress once again the importance of accurate information, and call on US voters to avoid creating another election campaign that would be mired in rumor.

A fake newsstand was set up. Newsstands are commonplace in the United States, selling various newspapers and magazines, much like Japanese news kiosks. This newsstand showed newspapers and magazines with implausible headlines such as “President Trump claims US should not have accepted Canadian independence”, “toddlers caught in fistfight” and “painkilling compounds mixed in with drinking water”. A careful look revealed that while the newspapers and magazines on the newsstand closely resembled actual publications, the content was completely fake. The stand demonstrated how people’s attention can be completely captured by shocking headlines. Confusion results from the conflict between the trust in the media that conveys the news and doubts over the communicated content. The experience is designed to remind people of the need to think once again about how we respond to media information and convey the message that even when we see stories in the media, we must　carefully assess whether the information presented is actually true.

Generally, when we encounter fake news, we encounter it as an individual. Recently, the majority of those encounters are online. While we may have a brief moment of skepticism over that news, we cannot really expect individual people to personally conduct a deep investigation into the truth of the matter. However, when fake news is presented in a real physical space, we can, from our prior experience, instinctively sense that something is suspicious and likely false. That is why CRJ decided to display this newsstand in an open, public venue. The fake newsstand featured dummy versions of more than 20 different newspapers and magazines. These were handed out free of charge. A unique aspect of the project was that inside each publication there was information on how to identify fake news. Overall, the project worked to show how easily people will take false information on board.

CJR’s research suggests that only around 30% of US adults are unable to identify fake news. In addition, while it has not been officially investigated, some research suggest that articles designed to be humorous or ridiculous are shared on social media 70% more frequently than actual news articles. This campaign also asked questions of media organizations on their responsibility to deliver accurate, fair, and trustworthy news to the public. This example demonstrates the difficulty in the modern world of finding and identifying the “truth”.

The fake newsstand was sited at the intersection of 42nd St. and 6th Avenue, one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan, meaning that several 100,000 passers-by must have seen it. Through PR campaign, the project was covered by more than 300 media in 100 different nations, reportedly reaching 2 billion people. In today’s world, the prevalence of social media means that if information is released in an appropriately designed way, that information will naturally pass through various channels to reach a large number of people. The Fake Newsstand is a great example of how the mechanisms that see fake news spread quickly to become the topic du jour can conversely be harnessed to encourage the self-propelled dissemination of specific, targeted information.

News full of lies and speculation spreads fast. That is exactly why one misstep can result in a company finding itself caught up in a damaging debate. However, an increasing number of activities are underway with the aim of how many facing the “truth”, capturing its essence, and clarifying where the real debate should lie, presenting these matters afresh to the public. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, a growing number of companies are launching brand activities that are designed to embody the company’s purpose. Let’s first take a look at a pioneering example of this PR strategy, the Nike Dream Crazy campaign from 2018.

This campaign was launched to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the now universally recognized tagline JUST DO IT. However, Nike took the 30th anniversary campaign in a direction that no one was expecting.

The campaign was led by American footballer Colin Kaepernick, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers. Kaepernick began kneeling instead of standing when the United States national anthem played before American football matches to protest against racial discrimination, including the shooting deaths of Black people by police. In the United States, the national anthem is sung, and the national flag raised at various events to show respect to the nation, and at such times everyone is commonly expected to stand. This is the custom at numerous sporting events. As athletes are supposed to take the lead in standing, the refusal of an athlete, what’s more a star, to do so, was seen by some people, including President Trump, as extremely insulting. Whether or not it was the result of political pressure remains unclear, but the NFL agreed with President Trump and started obliging athletes to stand for the national anthem, where previously it had only been custom. This requirement became a matter of controversy across the United States.

After the end of the 2016 season, these events led to the San Francisco 49ers canceling Colin Kaepernick’s contract. Even after he became a free agent, Kaepernick continued to protest. Other teams, watching the reaction of the president and the NFL, also chose not to hire him. However, Nike chose to cast Kaepernick, who had been de facto banned from the NFL, as the face of their campaign. This was a risky move for Nike, as the company has a close relationship with the NFL, and the company’s founder Phil Knight, was reportedly originally against the move.

The campaign, once it began, immediately split the US in half. A #boycottNike hashtag trended on Twitter (now ‘X’), some people even recorded video of themselves burning Nike sneakers. President Trump, posting on Twitter, wrote “What was Nike thinking?”, and Nike’s shares plunged. However, support for the campaign, centering around media organizations and millennials, quickly grew, and the wind soon changed. The stock price recovered, before eventually going onto reach the company’s highest ever price, with the company’s sales also rising higher, recording a 31% increase. The Dream Crazy campaign went on to win a large number of awards including two Grand Prix in the categories of entertainment and outdoor at the 2019 Cannes Lions.

It's worth noting that Nike’s Dream Crazy, as well as the 2023 #KeepTheGrey and #TurnYourBack campaigns from Dove, were created by taking controversial issues that were causing, or looked likely to cause a debate, and combining those issues with the company’s own brand story to release a new story. By linking the presentation of the brand to the truth inherent in the news, anchoring it to reality, they were able to harness the opposing positions over the issue to energize the debate. In Nike’s case, Nike positioned itself against the NFL and the President, whereas Dove positioned itself against the television station that sacked the newscaster, and also against tiktok. Rather than taking a “self-centered” stance that focuses solely on the company’s own view of its own position in its own industry, these companies instead decided to clearly state their own position on issues of public interest, in their role as a corporate citizen. While advertising is one way in which companies highlight their own image, a campaign accompanied by real action immediately produces a sense of reality. By creating a new field of communication that one could say fuses aspects of advertising and journalism, companies are able to involve society in their campaigns, and involvement that includes consumers both for their position and against their position and consumers both with and without a touchpoint with the company. If we think about it calmly, we could argue that keeping one’s hand out of the fire is generally the best policy, but it does seem as though diving right into the heart of the issue, and attempting to “coordinate” an appropriate discussion, while infusing the company’s own position into the topic, is becoming a new, and affective means of communication at a time when simple advertisements are no longer having quite the same impact. However, while saying that, it is clear that a not inconsiderable degree of fortitude and skill is required to make effective use of this technique.

Our next case study is the “The Unfiltered History Tour” from 2022. It is an unofficial audio guide to the British Museum in London produced by the online media organization VICE World News.

Vice World News as a new media organization that was launched to provide global news to young viewers around the world. Vice began as a free newspaper covering skater and youth culture on the West Coast of the United States. Its content was sometimes rather extreme. After it became a subsidiary of “i-D magazine” in 2012, the size of the company grew. The objective of the campaign is to “cover topics that are usually difficult to report on (such as colonialism), positioning Vice at the forefront of those conversations, so as to increase its audience by reaching those who share its outspoken positions”. Considering the overseas edition of Vice we used to read early in the 2000s, my first impression was “I’m surprised they’ve taken this position”, but if you look closely, you can see that their sharp-tongued stance has not changed. The title on their entry sheet is “The British Museum is the world’s largest receiver of stolen goods”. When I saw this rather sarcastic headline, I was relieved to see that they have not changed at all!

According to Vice, the British museum’s collection of more than 8 million objects consists almost entirely of items that may have been stolen from Britain’s colonies. While some countries are requesting the return of items in the collection to the country of origin, the British Museum is refusing those demands. The “Unfiltered History Tour” was created to pass that fact onto the public, particularly a younger audience. Younger visitors to the museum are using the tour has an opportunity to learn historical facts about how particular exhibited items came to be in the museum’s collection, and as an opportunity to think about how we should conceptualize the past.

The tour works quite simply. Visitors to the museum simply use their smartphones to scan the stolen exhibits. Using geolocation, Instagram’s augmented reality (AR) filter is then activated. This allows the visitor to listen to an expert from the exhibit’s original country explain the truth behind the stealing of the item, as well as the location that the item was stolen from. Rather than the story as told by the British Museum, the AR content presents the history as told by the robbed side. The Unfiltered History Tour’s microsite also allows visitors from around the world who are unable to go to the museum to have the same experience.

As you might expect, the British Museum does not approve of this tour. Therefore, Vice’s London team had to work anonymously, using LiDAR*2 technology to gather data. This was just part of the significant work that went into the project, with AR technicians also developing an Instagram filter based on real time weather data to match the lighting conditions inside the museum, so that the AR flexibly responded to the museum’s actual environment. The hard work paid off, resulting in not only a Gold award in the Digital Craft category at the Cannes Lions, but also Grand Prix in the Radio & Audio, Brand Experience & Activation, and Social & Influencer categories.

More than 100,000 people experienced The Unfiltered History Tour. According to a YouGov*3 poll taken a few weeks after the tour began, 59% of British people said that the “Elgin marbles,” which were taken from the Parthenon (one of the items included in the tour), do belong to Greece. The campaign achieved notable results, with 18 million recorded impressions, a 49% increase in Vice’s total Instagram impressions, and a 40% increase in TikTok followers.

The Vice campaign and the Missing Matoaka campaign, which we mentioned just now, both produced significant results by presenting a new truth to counter the prevailing, one-sided values told by the British Museum and Disney, respectively, greatly changing the perspective of the viewer. Furthermore, as you might expect from projects that were recognized in the Radio & Audio category, the way in which the teams hacked existing platforms to present the campaign was extremely skillful. The voice campaign was built on British Museum exhibits, and the Muskrat Magazine campaign was built on Disney footage, as venues for their respective presentations. In addition, by creating an axis of conflict to provoke debate, and putting forward new truths for comparison with previously accepted truths, these campaigns were able to create a bigger discussion and generate a strong impact. While some people may think it impossible to throw themselves so deeply into such controversy, and while I understand that position, I still think the essential nature of these campaigns can be harnessed to good effect in communication strategies.

The final campaign I would like to review is the most shocking; it is called The Lost Class.

In the United States, gun violence is one of the leading causes of mortality among children and teenagers, and support for gun control is increasing. However, organizations including the National Rifle Association (NRA) spend large sums of money, sums that vastly exceed the expenditure of gun control campaigners, so for political reasons, moves towards gun control see no progress. While it may be a complex environment involving multiple stakeholders, tackling the “truth” head on should automatically reveal the action that one needs to take. Let us take a look at Change the Ref., an organization that supports gun control, and its “The Lost Class” project, which aims to expose truths that people have tried to ignore to the cold light of day.

Of the high school students who were supposed to graduate in 2021 in the US, 3,044 students were unable to graduate because they had earlier died in gun-related incidents or accidents. This campaign used shocking imagery to drive that truth home. Change the Ref. came up with the idea of a fake graduation ceremony for a non-existent school called the “James Madison Academy”. The fictitious ceremony was held entirely without students. Two prominent gun right figures, David Keene, who is former President of the NRA, and author John Lott Jr., who wrote the book “More Guns Less Crime”, were asked to speak at the ceremony. They were led to believe they were taking part in the rehearsal for the graduation ceremony of a real school. Just like the consumers of fake news I referred to earlier, they had no idea they were being deceived. It is interesting to note James Madison is actually the name of the fourth US president, the man who drafted the second amendment to the US Constitution which mandates protection of the right to bear arms. His name was carefully chosen for the fictitious school to help remove any doubt the invitees might have had about the event.

Having been told it was a rehearsal, the two invitees began to make their speeches in front of 3,044 empty chairs. Without realizing they were being tricked by key figures in the gun control movement, they wished the students who were no longer alive due to gun violence all the best for their futures. This remarkable, ironic scene, was recorded, edited, and immediately distributed across the US. Images were shared widely online and by the news, directing people to the related website. The website contained detailed information about “The Lost Class” and gun violence in the United States, while also calling on website visitors to sign a petition against gun violence which in the end collected 40,000 signatures.

The wide media exposure sparked by the project, including social media, reached 1.4 billion impressions, with mentions of Change the Ref increasing by 21 times in two weeks. We should note that Change the Ref’s lead organizer Manuel Oliver lost his 17-year-old son in a mass shooting.

The project sparked much debate, including disagreement with the appropriateness of misleading the gun rights advocates and suggestions that the project might actually deepen divisions. While people in Japan, where the culture revolves around “cherishing harmony” may find it difficult to accept the use of these techniques to reignite stagnated debates, there is much we can learn from these creative methods of increasing an issue’s visibility. The 3,044 empty chairs laid out in regular rows, sitting on a green lawn, under the blue sky, may resemble a cemetery. Seeing just how many students lose their lives to gun violence from a single school year is enough to leave a person speechless. It was in that somber venue that the gun rights advocates gave their upbeat speeches. This contrast felt like a real life version of the satirical cartoons many media enjoy publishing, adding to the irony of the situation. It is difficult to imagine the number 3,044, but setting out the empty chairs in this way made it instantly easy to imagine. In fact, it was likely the visual impact of The Lost Class that led to the project going viral. Now that social media exists as a means of rapidly disseminating information, clever ideas for the visual presentation are becoming more and more important.

The first of these is an advertising campaign from the Middle East/North African region. This campaign, created by Adidas, was called the “Liquid Billboard”, and it was designed to increase the opportunities that women have to freely enjoy swimming in public places.

This campaign, which won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the media category in 2022, also won the Grand Prix at Adfest, the largest advertising festival in Asia. In terms of visual impact and approach, this campaign has creative similarities with The Lost Class we looked at just now.

The inspiration for the campaign comes from data suggesting that 32% of women worldwide are reluctant to swim in front of other people, a figure that rises to 88% in the Middle East. In societies with no common practice of swimming, or wearing a swimming costume, it can be difficult for women to freely enjoy swimming as a sport or as a hobby. Often, in our society, we think of water in connection with an image of “freedom”. However, in these regions, cultural considerations, or a lack of body confidence may produce obstacles and restrictions.

To promote its a new, inclusive swimwear, which anyone can use, irrespective of body shape, ethnicity, swimming ability, or religion, Adidas built a swimming pool on a beach in the shape of a billboard. The structure was five meters high, with the three-meter deep pool containing 11,500 gallons of water. The installation was opened to the public as a pool that women could swim in freely. The pool included a special underwater camera that captured the experiences of all the women who use the pool, turning it into an original digital poster, which was then live-streamed to a digital display in Dubai’s largest mall. While, previously, it was only really athletes and models who were filmed moving through the water, the digital display gave many people the opportunity to see a variety of different women proudly enjoying themselves in their swimwear. This campaign undoubtedly had an instant, pivotal impact in removing the aversion women felt over swimming in public.

The successful broadcast of a digital display in Dubai’s largest mall showing images of women actively enjoying themselves in a huge tank-like swimming pool set up on the beach is another dynamic example of visualizing a concept which could be applied in numerous other ways. The significance of the campaign lies in the way that it reveals and shares the “truth” that many women held a deep-seated desire to swim in this way. When a group comes together, thoughts that one cannot reveal as an individual can coalesce to become a force for social change. This campaign effectively provided an opportunity for such a groundswell to take place.

One question we can ask here is how members of the public react to and feel about a company that tries not simply to push a one-sided message, but tries rather to take the decision to create a concrete message together with the members of the public who are also the targets of the messaging. In other words, this campaign is firmly grounded in the concept, which comes from public relations, of weaving the recipients of information into the information narrative itself. I have to admit that I’m rather jealous of the skill with which that was done. The campaign reached 350 million people in more than 60 countries, with social media engagement rates of 17.7%.