Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100
As part of Newhouse’s Master’s programs, every student is required to enroll in a creative boot camp and are tasked with creating a number of creative projects using different photo editing software. For this project, we were asked to create a poster ad for a real-life event (past or present) of our choosing and I decided to go with the 2018 Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100 event.
Rationale —
The Event
The event I chose to design my poster for was the 2018 Global Citizen Festival Mandela 100 that was held in Johannesburg, South Africa on December 2, 2018. The festival commemorated the 100th birthday of Nelson Mandela, with headlining performers such as Beyoncé, JAY-Z, Coldplay’s Chris Martin and more in attendance. I decided to select this event because I loved the international advocacy and philanthropic causes Global Citizen champions in its efforts to increasingly encourage leaders in making important strides in global issues.
Target Audience
The target audience for this poster was young, impassioned people between the ages of 25 to 34, eager to bring awareness to both local and international crises plaguing the world’s inhabitants. This ad would not only appear in OOH ads, but as a 3 to 10 second full-screen vertical video ad on Instagram and Snapchat stories. The vertical ads would include a swipe-up button connecting the user to Global Citizen’s website on how to earn tickets to the concert, and more through actionable activities like spreading advocacy about the causes the organization is trying to bring awareness to.
Strategy
Ideally, I wanted this ad to serve as a talking piece for the audience and I felt that could be done by drawing the viewer into the juxtaposition between what appears as an easily accessible commodity within reach, but is actually an incredibly inaccessible, basic need for those they bump shoulders with on a regular basis.
Despite 40 percent of Americans having a lack of access to the basic tenets of the human needs depicted: education, access to water, a passport/citizenship/visa and food, a large portion of them do. That said, I wanted the design to serve as a perspective shift for the viewer; that there are people around the world, including your next door neighbor, going without the basic needs depicted in the poster.
I want viewers to internalize their situation and use it to empathize with those who are without these needs. I believe it’s in this emotional connection that the audience will feel empowered and encouraged to be vocal about issues others are facing in contrast to theirs. In turn, this could positively lend itself to and further Global Citizen’s cause and goal of growing international advocacy about issues our scope of the world isn’t or may not be encompassing.