NSPCC | Ventriloquist | 2005
The Everyday Scene Where Everyone Pretends Not to See / NSPCC "Ventriloquist"
"What's 9 times 8?" The one who answers is a ventriloquist sitting behind a little girl. No one notices him at all. I still get chills watching this 70-second film NSPCC made back in 2005.
The problem
This was part of NSPCC's "Full Stop" campaign. In the UK in 2004, more than 32,000 children were at risk of abuse and needed help. This ad tried to get that number across not through tears, but through fear.
The insight
Copywriter Leo Premutico has said he translated the feelings of an abused child into the figure of a ventriloquist. A child whose voice has been taken away, surrounded by people who never notice anything is wrong—rather than leaving that loneliness as a metaphor, the sharp idea here is to actually show it as a strange, unsettling scene playing out on screen.
The idea
The series has three films. At school, with friends, at the family dinner table—in each scene the girl sits like a ventriloquist's dummy, and it's always the man sitting behind her who answers when she's asked something. Nobody looks at him. That act of pretending not to see is exactly the structure of abuse itself.
What happened
The ad was made by Saatchi & Saatchi. In 2005 it became the seventh most-awarded TV commercial in the world, and it won a Bronze at the British Arrows.
Afterthought
This isn't an easy commercial to watch. But showing this kind of unnoticed-ness sticks with you far longer than showing violence directly would. Even though it was made in 2005, it hasn't aged at all.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2005
