This California Department of Public Health campaign uses sharp, documentary storytelling to drive public health action— Clapboard's Global Ad Archive.
Vets Fight Hate - Southern Poverty Law | Clapboard Ad Archive
Vets Fight Hate, launched in 2017 by the Southern Poverty Law Center in partnership with agency Wing, tackles the challenge of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States by spotlighting a critical and often overlooked truth: immigrants comprise approximately 11% of all American veterans, individuals who have demonstrably served and sacrificed for the country. Positioned within the public service market and squarely aligned with Clapboard's FORMAT#7—Presenter Testimonial, the campaign abandons dramatization in favor of direct engagement, featuring real immigrant veterans who address the camera as themselves and respond to actual hateful tweets with messages of peace, inclusion, and unity. The creative premise leverages the honored status of veterans in American culture to challenge viewers’ assumptions about immigrants, transforming veterans from symbols of patriotism into messengers of empathy, urging the public to reconsider their preconceptions while foregrounding personal narratives that resist simplistic categorization. Rather than circulating messages through traditional advertising alone, Vets Fight Hate builds a participatory model by inviting audiences to join the conversation on social media — specifically via Twitter — and directs them to learn more at the campaign’s site, facilitating ongoing dialogue at the intersection of lived experience and digital activism. The approach recognizes that social media is a primary territory where hate speech proliferates, and deploys testimonial storytelling as both a shield and a counteroffensive, shifting discourse from anonymous vitriol to face-to-face accountability, and from collective suspicion to personal connection. By enlisting the Southern Poverty Law Center’s credibility and Wing's creative sensibility, the campaign navigates both the emotive and rational dimensions of advocacy, bringing home the consequences of intolerance while mobilizing the voices least likely to be dismissed: those who have served. The campaign earns 63/100 in Clapboard's global creative archive. In an era when nationalist rhetoric seeks to divide, Vets Fight Hate demonstrates that credible personal testimony remains one of the industry’s most potent answers to polarization.
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