How Refugees Welcome and FCB Zürich Turned Google Into a Tool Against Racism

Targeting Hate at the Source: The Strategic Logic Behind Search Racism Find Truth

FCB Zürich identified a fundamental asymmetry in the digital information environment. Online racist discourse about refugees was not merely loud — it was algorithmically amplified, surfaced precisely when users were actively searching for content that confirmed existing hostilities. The strategic insight was to enter that moment not with counter-argument but with direct human encounter.

In Switzerland, the refugee debate carried acute social weight during this period. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Switzerland received tens of thousands of asylum applications in 2015 and 2016, placing it among the highest per-capita recipient nations in Europe. The Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute documented that anti-refugee sentiment across Central European and German-speaking markets intensified sharply during this period alongside the growth of movements such as PEGIDA, which the campaign specifically targeted through YouTube placement strategy, as reported by Dw.

The competitive frame for this campaign is not conventional advertising. Its closest analogues are counter-narrative digital campaigns from organisations such as the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration, both of which have deployed digital storytelling to shift public attitudes toward displaced populations. What distinguished the Refugees Welcome approach was the precision of its targeting: rather than broadcasting broadly, it inserted itself into the specific, hostile search contexts where prejudice was being actively expressed and reinforced. This search-intercept model represented a meaningful tactical evolution in public interest digital campaigning, transforming a platform's commercial infrastructure into an instrument of social accountability.

The Creative Craft That Made Skip Prejudices More Than a Tagline

Dennis Lück served as chief creative officer at FCB Zürich on the campaign, with Andy Lusti and Hanja Baruschke as creative directors and Sarah Ming as copywriter, according to reporting by Adweek and documentation via LinkedIn. Client contacts Mareike Geiling and Jonas Kakoschke represented Refugees Welcome, per the same sources.

The creative execution rests on restraint. Each video places a refugee directly in front of the camera to address a specific stereotype or slur associated with the search term that triggered the placement. Syrian filmmaker Firas Al-Shater was among the nine participants, as reported by Adweek, lending the production an insider authenticity — one of the refugees was himself a filmmaker shaping the frame through which others were seen. The format is deliberately lo-fi by the standards of commercial advertising, foregrounding the speaker rather than production values, a choice that reinforces credibility over spectacle.

The "skip prejudices" device is the campaign's most discussed creative element, and justifiably so. By replacing a universally recognised interface prompt with a morally weighted alternative, FCB Zürich forced a micro-moment of reflection at the precise instant most pre-roll viewers are reaching for the skip function. The intervention is structural as much as it is verbal: it hijacks the conditioned reflex of ad-skipping and recontextualises it as a choice about whether to engage with another person's humanity. As noted by thenewhumanitarian.org, the campaign's placements were specifically mapped to anti-refugee search behaviour, ensuring that the audience encountering the "skip prejudices" prompt was not a general public but a targeted segment whose search history had already signalled hostility.

Cannes Lions, Clio Awards and What the Search Racism Campaign Results Reveal

The campaign earned a Media Lions Silver at Cannes Lions 2016, according to Bizcommunity.com, making it one of the most formally recognised public interest digital campaigns to emerge from Switzerland that year. It also received a Creative Data Lions Bronze, a Film Lions Bronze, and a Promo and Activation Lions Bronze at Cannes Lions 2016, with additional shortlists in the Cyber and Direct Lions categories, as documented by Bizcommunity.com and LinkedIn. Beyond Cannes, the campaign received Clio silver awards in the public affairs, cause-related, and banners and rich media categories, according to Hype5 Ch.

No independently verified audience reach or attitude-shift metrics for the campaign are publicly available beyond the awards record. The structural case for effectiveness, however, is unusually clear. By intercepting users at the moment of expressed hostility rather than broadcasting to a sympathetic general audience, the campaign maximised the probability that its message reached people who had not already self-selected into agreement. The search-intercept model means that every impression served was, by definition, delivered to someone whose own search behaviour had flagged relevance. In public interest advertising, this kind of precision targeting is rare and consequential. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects the campaign's genuine strategic innovation and its strong awards performance, balanced against the absence of publicly available outcome data and the inherent difficulty of converting a single digital touchpoint into measurable attitudinal change.