[You will need sound on to understand the advert]
This cinema advert was launched on Saturday, 8th August in cinemas all over the UK. It is our attempt to make a deliberate move away from some traditional charity advertising which can tend to focus on images of starving children.
We have deliberately left the child nameless and not identified the country in order to protect his identity and to encourage viewers to realise that violence of this sort occurs beyond just the borders of a single country.
This is new ground for us at MSF UK and we explicitly asked viewers and visitors to our website to give us feedback on the ad. The debate online around it has been massive (from the Osocio Blog you can find where the various debates are being held).
We have welcomed all the comments we received, both positive and negative, and they will help us in the development of future communications. However, whilst we are watching and listening to comments on blogs and other online forums, we are simply not able to get involved in every conversation due to our limited resources. We do hope people will understand.
You can still go to the Osocio Blog, amongst others, and make a comment directly (which can be anonymous). Unfortunately our website does not have the functionality to accept comments directly.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Please consider sharing this with your friends as we are working on the next ad in this series and would love to learn from what people think. You can use the Bookmark/Share function on the right hand side of this page.
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This advert was created for MSF for free by one of the UK's leading advertising agencies, McCann Erickson. They have been working with MSF on a pro-bono basis since 1995, providing their advertising expertise at the service of international medical humanitarian aid.
Not only have all the creative and technical people involved worked on the ad entirely free of charge but both the independent cinema advertisers Pearl and Dean and Digital Cinema Media have also very kindly offered to run the ad for free before films rated 15 and above.
We are aware that the ad is haunting and disturbing. But we hope that it encourages people to think about the situation of our patients and what, with their support, MSF can do to help.