How the ICRC and Sra. Rushmore Made Wartime Choice Impossible to Ignore
"Choose" is a public interest film created by Sra. Rushmore for the International Committee of the Red Cross, published in Spain in February 2019, designed to place the audience inside the morally impossible decisions that armed conflict forces upon civilians and combatants alike.
The campaign enters the archive as a single-film asset, a deliberate formal choice that concentrates its entire argumentative weight into one sustained cinematic encounter rather than dispersing it across formats. The ICRC, as the leading international humanitarian organisation mandated under the Geneva Conventions to protect victims of war, used the Spanish market as its publication platform for "Choose," signalling both the agency relationship with Madrid-based Sra. Rushmore and a broader ambition to reach European audiences already sensitised to the consequences of conflict through news saturation. In Spain, public discourse around humanitarian crises has remained prominent in the years following the European refugee emergency, providing a contextually receptive environment for a campaign of this moral register.
The objective of "Choose" sits firmly within the public interest category that the ICRC and Sra. Rushmore had been jointly building through a sustained creative partnership dating back at least to "Decisions" in November 2017, as documented on adsoftheworld.com. Rather than soliciting donations or driving a specific behavioural call to action, the campaign pursues the harder goal of perspective shift — asking audiences to inhabit a position of moral exposure before returning to the safety of their screens. That ambition places "Choose" within the upper tier of advocacy filmmaking, where the measure of success is not a click but a recalibration of how a viewer understands human suffering. Clapboard Score: 74/100.
Sra. Rushmore built the strategic architecture of "Choose" on a precise insight. Audiences in Spain and across Europe had grown accustomed to humanitarian imagery as ambient backdrop — present, but no longer penetrating. The agency's answer was not to show more suffering but to engineer an experience of decision, shifting the viewer from passive witness to implicated participant.
This approach reflects a wider tension in public interest advertising identified by The Good Report 2017, which evaluated more than one thousand campaigns from agencies across eighty countries and found that thirty-one of the forty final-ranked campaigns were produced for NGOs, institutions, and foundations, according to Little Black Book. The density of cause-driven creative work means that differentiation within the public interest category is acutely competitive. Against peers such as Amnesty International, which has consistently deployed immersive and confrontational film formats to drive awareness of human rights violations, and Médecins Sans Frontières, which has favoured testimony-driven documentary approaches in the European market, the ICRC required a format that felt neither like charity appeal nor photojournalism report.
The ICRC's creative relationship with Sra. Rushmore had already produced "Don't Be Numb" in March 2018, a campaign addressing the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions that used film, an online game, a quiz, and data visualisation to reach younger audiences, as recorded on adsoftheworld.com. "Choose" distilled that multi-format experimentation back into a single, uninterrupted film, betting that concentration rather than dispersion would produce deeper cognitive engagement. In Spain, where the film was published, the confluence of residual public sensitivity to the Syrian conflict and high social media penetration among adults created conditions in which a morally charged short film could circulate beyond paid media placement.
"Choose" operates in a documentary register, using the formal language of observational cinema to establish the credibility that fictional reconstruction would undermine. The film's single-asset structure, confirmed in the Clapboard archive, places the entire burden of persuasion on sustained craft rather than campaign architecture.
Production credits for "Choose" are not publicly documented in the sources available to Clapboard, and neither the director nor the creative director has been confirmed through adsoftheworld.com, oneclub.org, controlpublicidad.com, or campaignlive.co.uk at the time of writing. What the archive and related reporting do confirm is that Sra. Rushmore, the Madrid-based agency, served as the creative originator of the work, maintaining the agency-client relationship with the ICRC that had already yielded formally ambitious output across "Decisions" in 2017, "Don't Be Numb" in 2018, and "Hope" in 2018, the last of which addressed attacks on hospitals and health workers under the message "Healthcare is #NotATarget" and was broadcast in more than one hundred countries, as reported by campaignlive.co.uk and icrc.org.
The creative logic of "Choose" borrows from the social experiment tradition in documentary filmmaking, a mode that places real or representative participants in structured dilemmas and records the consequence. This approach carries specific rhetorical advantages for a humanitarian organisation: it naturalises the moral argument rather than asserting it, and it allows the audience to arrive at the ICRC's institutional position through apparent self-discovery rather than instruction. In Spain in 2019, that mode of address aligned with a broader cultural appetite for immersive factual content that several streaming platforms were simultaneously cultivating in the domestic market. The title itself, "Choose," functions as both imperative and accusation — a one-word distillation of the campaign's entire strategic and creative intent.
No verified performance data for "Choose" is publicly available. No reach figures, awareness uplift metrics, donation response data, or media spend information have been reported by the ICRC, Sra. Rushmore, or any third-party source including adsoftheworld.com, oneclub.org, or WARC at the time of writing.
The absence of declared metrics is not uncommon for public interest campaigns in Spain and across the European humanitarian sector, where organisations of the ICRC's mandate frequently decline to reduce the moral weight of a campaign to performance dashboards. What the structural evidence does support is a reading of "Choose" as a campaign engineered for depth over breadth. A single-film format with a social experiment construction is not optimised for mass reach; it is optimised for impact-per-viewer, the kind of sustained affective engagement that produces the opinion shifts humanitarian organisations depend on when lobbying governments and influencing policy environments.
The campaign also carries no confirmed award recognition across Cannes Lions, the One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the Effies, as confirmed through oneclub.org and adsoftheworld.com. It is worth noting, as documented on adsoftheworld.com, that archival records occasionally conflate "Choose" with the related ICRC film "Hope," and that The One Club's 2019 records list related ICRC and Sra. Rushmore work under the title "Hope" rather than "Choose," a distinction that complicates any definitive account of the campaign's competitive standing. Despite the absence of quantified outcomes, "Choose" represents a coherent and disciplined expression of the ICRC and Sra. Rushmore's shared creative philosophy across the 2017 to 2019 period.
"Choose" is a public interest film created by Sra. Rushmore for the International Committee of the Red Cross, published in Spain in February 2019. It uses a documentary and social experiment approach to place viewers inside the moral decisions forced by armed conflict, forming part of a sustained ICRC creative series from 2017 to 2019.
Sra. Rushmore created "Choose" for the ICRC. The Madrid-based agency had an established creative partnership with the International Committee of the Red Cross, having previously produced "Decisions" in 2017, "Don't Be Numb" in 2018, and "Hope" in 2018, which aired in more than one hundred countries according to campaignlive.co.uk and icrc.org.
"Choose" has no confirmed award recognition across Cannes Lions, D&AD, the One Show, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the Effies, as verified through oneclub.org and adsoftheworld.com. Archival records sometimes conflate the campaign with the related ICRC film "Hope," which complicates a definitive account of its competitive standing.
"Choose" operates in a documentary register informed by social experiment filmmaking, placing audiences inside structured moral dilemmas rather than presenting humanitarian arguments directly. Sra. Rushmore delivered the campaign as a single film asset, concentrating persuasive force into one sustained cinematic encounter rather than a multi-format campaign architecture, as recorded in the Clapboard archive.
The ICRC "Choose" campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100. This editorial rating reflects the campaign's disciplined single-film format, its coherent strategic logic within the public interest category, and its position within a creatively consistent body of ICRC and Sra. Rushmore work produced across Spain between 2017 and 2019.
"Choose" is the third confirmed chapter in a creative series the ICRC and Sra. Rushmore built in Spain from 2017 onward. It follows "Decisions" from November 2017 and "Don't Be Numb" from March 2018, the latter using film, an online game, and data visualisation, as documented on adsoftheworld.com, before "Choose" returned to a concentrated single-film format.
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