#NonPublicWorks - Fundación Saraki | Clapboard Ad Archive
#NonPublicWorks, conceived for Fundación Saraki by Publicis in Paraguay in 2015, is a digital campaign that reframes the conversation around public infrastructure by flipping the familiar concept of obras públicas into a sharp critique on social exclusion, particularly the invisible barriers faced by people with disabilities—an issue central to Fundación Saraki’s mission. Settled squarely within the public service category and executed as a documentary-meets-social-experiment, the campaign adopts a strategy that Clapboard’s 12-format taxonomy classifies as FORMAT#3—Symbolize the Problem: instead of pointing directly to mismanaged or inaccessible public works, it uses the collective idea of what is meant to serve all as a metaphor for how opacity and negligence in civic projects can systematically leave segments of the population unserved or outright excluded. The creative approach dispenses with expository narrative or dramatized testimonials, leveraging the unmistakable iconography of public works—the universal language of the built environment—as a cipher to decode complex structural inequalities, thus inviting the audience to confront absence and invisibility as the real obstacles to inclusion. Publicis’s campaign demonstrates a highly strategic use of digital media, deploying a single, focused asset to cut through the noise of social feeds, ensuring the message remains both direct and urgent for a Spanish-speaking audience attuned to public accountability. Rather than selling a solution or delivering a granular exposé, #NonPublicWorks pivots the spotlight onto public works themselves as symbols of missed opportunity, subtly suggesting the complicit silence in society that lets non-inclusive practices persist. The collaboration evident in the campaign’s production reflects Fundación Saraki’s commitment to aligning advocacy with contemporary communication—an approach that positions them not as scolds but as stewards of public conscience, reframing a national conversation on governmental transparency in Paraguay. By drawing attention to how infrastructure that is nominally public can, through neglect or failing oversight, become functionally private, the campaign compels citizens to bridge the gap between awareness and action. The campaign earns 57/100 in Clapboard’s global creative archive. For an industry so often tasked with surface-level engagement, #NonPublicWorks matters because it signals the enduring power of metaphor to unlock difficult public discourse when literal storytelling simply cannot cut through.
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