DAGOMA | Harmless Guns | 2019
To make a gun harmless, just rewrite its blueprint / DAGOMA "Harmless Guns"
In an age when 3D printers can make guns, the printer maker itself saved the world by spreading fake blueprints—without firing a single bullet.
The problem
In 2018, it was reported that blueprints for the "Liberator," a gun that can be manufactured with a 3D printer, had spread online. A gun with no serial number, invisible to metal detectors, had become something anyone could download.
The insight
What's impressive is that they faced reality head-on: shutting down the dark web wouldn't stop the blueprints from spreading. So instead of trying to regulate it, they committed fully to a different idea—contaminate the market itself with fake blueprints that look just like the real thing but don't actually work.
The idea
The team at TBWA\Paris went undercover, infiltrating gun enthusiast forums and the dark web to collect real gun blueprints, which they then altered. They built multiple tiny flaws into a single part—parts that wouldn't fit together, a barrel caliber that didn't match the bullet, a hammer that couldn't reach its target—all while keeping the look and weight indistinguishable from the real thing. They then released these doctored files back into the same places. They also developed open-source software to detect these fraudulent files, and offered it to other 3D printer makers as well.
What happened
With zero budget, within less than ten days the campaign was picked up by ten TV stations in France and abroad and numerous other media outlets, racking up 128 million impressions across more than 25 countries. The altered files were downloaded more than 13,000 times, and the effort ended up working together with France's cybercrime unit. At Cannes Lions 2019, it won a total of 18 awards in the PR category, including Gold.
Afterthought
A gun that took 15 to 20 hours to print—rendered useless forever because the hammer falls just 1mm short. Imagining that is both a little funny and a little chilling. This is a case worth remembering forever, where advertising leapt past the job of "communicating" and actually did the job of "sabotaging."
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2019
