Propuesta Civica AC and Publicis launched #StillSpeakingUp in Mexico in May 2019, reactivating murdered journalists' Twitter accounts to confront press freedom
ARCHIVEPropuesta Civica AC and Publicis Turn Dead Journalists Into Living Voices
#StillSpeakingUp is a May 2019 integrated public-interest campaign created by Publicis Mexico for human-rights organisation Propuesta Cívica AC, in which the Twitter accounts of four murdered Mexican journalists were reactivated so that they could speak again about the causes associated with their deaths.
Propuesta Cívica AC launched the campaign inside one of the most dangerous environments for press freedom in the world. In Mexico, journalists covering organised crime, corruption, and local politics face violence at a rate that consistently places the country among the world's most lethal for reporters, a context that gave the campaign its moral urgency. The objective was direct: to force public and political attention onto a freedom-of-expression crisis that was claiming lives with impunity, and to sustain that pressure beyond the brief news cycle that typically follows each killing.
The campaign's central mechanic was both simple and confrontational. Rather than producing conventional advocacy materials, Publicis Mexico worked with Propuesta Cívica to reactivate the dormant social media accounts of journalists who had been murdered, allowing those accounts to post again about the very issues for which those journalists were killed. The phrase #SeguimosHablando — #StillSpeakingUp — became both the campaign hashtag and its editorial argument: that silence is not inevitable, and that the silencing of a journalist does not silence the truth. The campaign ran as an integrated effort across Twitter Mexico and supplementary media, targeting Spanish-language audiences in Mexico with the ambition of reaching international press-freedom and human-rights communities. Clapboard scores #StillSpeakingUp at 63 out of 100, reflecting strong strategic clarity and cultural resonance alongside limited documented reach metrics from its original May 2019 release.
Propuesta Cívica AC identified a specific cultural and psychological problem at the heart of Mexico's press-freedom crisis. The murder of a journalist produces a moment of outrage, then silence — a silence that itself becomes complicit. The strategic insight driving #StillSpeakingUp was that social media platforms, which had become primary instruments of journalism and public accountability in Mexico, could be turned into instruments of posthumous advocacy.
Publicis Mexico, under Chief Strategy Officer Samantha Hernández, built the campaign around the idea that the accounts of murdered journalists retained both audience and authority, according to the campaign's documentation on adsoftheworld.com. Rather than creating new channels and asking audiences to follow them, the strategy activated existing, trusted identities — accounts that followers already knew and mourned. This moved the campaign out of the register of conventional NGO communication and into the territory of news event, generating organic engagement that paid media alone could not replicate.
The competitive context matters here. Organisations such as Article 19 and Reporters Without Borders operate sophisticated press-freedom advocacy programmes in Mexico and globally, but their communications typically target specialist human-rights audiences. Publicis Mexico's strategy for Propuesta Cívica was designed to breach the mainstream public conversation on Twitter Mexico — a platform where, according to Mexico Mom-Gmr, media concentration and ownership opacity already undermined independent journalism. By operating inside the platform rather than commenting on it from outside, the campaign occupied ground that competitors in the advocacy space had not claimed. The Mexican government's advertising budget stood at approximately MXN 4.2 billion in 2019, according to mexico.mom-gmr.org, with approximately 40 to 50 percent of official advertising flowing to just ten media groups despite more than one thousand eligible providers — a structural imbalance that made independent public-interest campaigns like this one all the more consequential.
Publicis Mexico built #StillSpeakingUp around a discipline of restraint. The creative team, led by Chief Creative Officer and Copywriter Diego Wallach and Head of Art Luis Sordo, with Art Director Maricarmen Mercado, according to goldendrum.com, did not manufacture sentiment through conventional advertising techniques — no voiceover, no dramatic music, no reconstructed tragedy. The creative act was the reactivation itself: the appearance of a dead journalist's name in a follower's feed, posting again, was designed to produce a moment of shock and recognition that no produced film could replicate.
The decision to work within Twitter's existing interface was a precise creative choice. The platform's design carries its own emotional grammar — a name, a handle, a timestamp — and the campaign weaponised familiarity. Followers who had watched a journalist's account fall silent after their murder encountered posts appearing as if the journalist had never stopped working. The editorial voice of each account was maintained, connecting the posthumous posts directly to the specific themes — corruption, disappearance, cartel violence — for which each journalist had been killed. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign included the account of Javier Valdez Cárdenas, the Sinaloa-based journalist murdered in 2017, whose likeness was later used in the AI-extended phase of the campaign known as #StillSpeakingUp DeepTruth, developed with the permission of his widow, journalist Griselda Triana, as documented on dandad.org.
The original May 2019 campaign contained one media asset, as noted in Clapboard's archive, a concentration of creative force into a single, scalable mechanism rather than a multiformat production. Production credits for the full technical execution of #StillSpeakingUp are not comprehensively documented in publicly available sources beyond the core team identified via goldendrum.com and dandad.org.
ARCHIVE#StillSpeakingUp earned the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Good in 2021, according to Little Black Book and adlatina.com — one of the advertising industry's most significant honours for work serving the public interest. The award came two years after the campaign's original May 2019 launch in Mexico, reflecting a judging cycle that recognised the campaign's extended arc across its DeepTruth iteration as well as its originating concept.
No verified platform-level performance data — impressions, reach, follower engagement rates, or earned media valuations — for the May 2019 version of #StillSpeakingUp is publicly available from Propuesta Cívica, Publicis Mexico, or independent measurement sources. What is documentable is the campaign's structural effectiveness. By operating inside Twitter Mexico rather than advertising around it, #StillSpeakingUp generated the conditions for organic news coverage, which in an environment where, according to mexico.mom-gmr.org, official advertising dominates media economics, represents a meaningful form of impact. The campaign's recognition at D&AD, documented on dandad.org, and at the Golden Drum festival, per goldendrum.com, further confirms its standing within the international creative community as a formally distinguished piece of public-interest work. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign was also archived as a reference point for cause-led integrated work in Latin America. Propuesta Cívica, founded in 2011 according to adobomagazine.com, had not produced a documented advertising campaign of this nature before 2019, making #StillSpeakingUp a foundational creative moment for the organisation's public communications and a benchmark for how civil society in Mexico can deploy platform-native tactics in defence of press freedom.
#StillSpeakingUp is a May 2019 public-interest campaign created by Publicis Mexico for Propuesta Cívica AC in Mexico. It reactivated the Twitter accounts of murdered Mexican journalists, allowing them to post again about the causes linked to their deaths, challenging public silence around Mexico's press-freedom crisis.
Publicis Mexico created the campaign for Propuesta Cívica AC. Chief Creative Officer and Copywriter Diego Wallach led the creative team, supported by Head of Art Luis Sordo and Art Director Maricarmen Mercado, with Chief Strategy Officer Samantha Hernández overseeing strategy, according to goldendrum.com.
#StillSpeakingUp received the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Good in 2021, according to lbbonline.com and adlatina.com. The award recognised the campaign's integrated approach to public-interest advocacy in Mexico, including its original 2019 Twitter mechanic and the subsequent AI-extended DeepTruth phase.
Javier Valdez Cárdenas, the Sinaloa journalist murdered in 2017, was included in the original campaign's reactivated Twitter accounts. A later AI-generated likeness of Valdez appeared in the DeepTruth extension, created with permission from his widow, journalist Griselda Triana, as documented on dandad.org.
Publicis Mexico built the campaign inside Twitter Mexico's existing platform rather than advertising around it. Reactivating verified, known journalist accounts created news-event conditions organically, bypassing a Mexican media landscape where, according to mexico.mom-gmr.org, official advertising concentrated among just ten dominant media groups.
#StillSpeakingUp holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong strategic clarity and cultural resonance within Mexico's press-freedom debate, balanced against limited publicly verified performance data from its original May 2019 integrated release by Publicis for Propuesta Cívica AC.
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