Women's Aid: Love Is… 4

Engine Creative has devised a pro bono DOOH and Social campaign for client, Women’s Aid, which will run nationwide on Valentine’s Day. The brief was to disrupt people’s expectations of Valentine’s Day – a time when relationships are front of mind – and teach them about the signs of unhealthy relationships and coercive control. The idea was, instead of telling people what ‘Love Is...’, the out of home eye-catching executions illustrate what ‘Love is Not...’ While a successful Women’s Aid campaign made it illegal in December 2015, records of coercive control offences have been steadily rising. Police recorded 24,856 coercive control offences in England and Wales in the year ending March 2020, a huge rise of more than 50% from the 16,679 recorded the previous year. The pandemic has only exacerbated the problem. Within the first two weeks of lockdown alone, there was a 41% increase in users visiting the Women’s Aid Live Chat site to seek help on the issue. Research by Women’s Aid and Cosmopolitan in 2019 found that over a third of teenage girls had been in abusive relationships and more shocking still, when the remaining two thirds were asked about their relationships, 64% had been in abusive relationships without even realising it. The work is born from the agency's ‘Truth and Friction’ creative philosophy, which pits the ‘truth’ against ‘friction’ to tell a story. The truth in this campaign, being that many people mistake controlling behaviours in their relationships for love; with the friction element built around subverting the norms of traditional Valentine’s Day imagery. In this way, the work plays on the traditional iconography of love and relationships; encouraging audiences to question what healthy relationship behaviours are.