Respect Zone's Stop Harassment campaign, created by Publicis Conseil for Facebook's Hack for Good in France, reframed school bullying as a recurring horror
ARCHIVERespect Zone Turns School Harassment Into a Horror Story Worth Sharing
Respect Zone's "Stop Harassment" campaign, created by Publicis Conseil and launched in France in November 2019, uses a documentary and social experiment format to expose the reputational and psychological damage of school bullying by framing it as a recurring horror experience lived by students every day.
Respect Zone was founded in 2014, according to respectzone.org, and has since built a body of communications work focused on combating online hate, cyberbullying, and school harassment across France. The "Stop Harassment" campaign represents a deliberate narrowing of that mission: where earlier efforts addressed broad online-respect advocacy, this 2019 initiative targets the specific, lasting harm that harassment inflicts on a young person's reputation and sense of self. The campaign was entered into the fifth edition of Hack for Good, a creative competition organised by Facebook and designed to encourage agencies to develop socially purposeful work, making it one of the more structurally unusual entries in the public interest advertising space that year.
In France, the campaign arrives at a moment of heightened public awareness around school violence. UNESCO reported in 2019 that bullying and school violence were widespread internationally, with evidence pointing to the scale of the problem rather than advertising responses to it. The "Stop Harassment" film positions Respect Zone as a proactive voice in that conversation, addressing an audience of students, parents, and educators who encounter the consequences of harassment both online and in physical school environments. Clapboard.com records the campaign as comprising three media assets, giving it a focused rather than multi-channel footprint. With a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, the campaign demonstrates solid creative intent and cultural relevance while leaving room for greater measurable reach and documented outcome data.
ARCHIVERespect Zone's strategic brief centres on a specific insight: harassment is not experienced as a single incident but as a relentless, repeated assault on identity and reputation. The decision by Publicis Conseil to frame the campaign as a documentary social experiment rather than a conventional public service announcement reflects a broader shift in how French advocacy communications engage younger audiences. By staging real-life scenarios and allowing subjects to respond without scripted direction, the campaign generates the kind of unguarded emotional authenticity that planned advertising cannot easily replicate.
The Hack for Good competition, organised by Facebook, provided both a distribution platform and a strategic rationale for centering social media in the campaign's mechanics. In France, social media platforms are central to the daily lives of the school-age demographic Respect Zone targets, making Facebook's involvement structurally coherent rather than merely promotional. The campaign's approach aligns with the Safe to Learn initiative launched in January 2019, a five-year global programme involving UNESCO, UNICEF, and UNGEI, according to ungei.org, which sought to end violence in schools through coordinated awareness-raising efforts. "Stop Harassment" operates in the same cultural register, treating school harassment as a systemic problem requiring sustained public attention rather than a single-moment intervention.
In the competitive landscape of French public interest communications, organisations such as the Ligue de l'Enseignement and government-backed bodies under France's national plan against school bullying have historically owned the institutional conversation around harassment prevention. Respect Zone differentiates itself by working through the advertising industry and creative competitions rather than through educational policy channels, giving its campaigns a tone and visual grammar more familiar to young audiences. That positioning makes the Publicis Conseil partnership a strategic asset: the agency brings craft and media fluency to a cause that might otherwise remain confined to institutional registers.
Directors James Maciver and Mikael Arlanyan shape the "Stop Harassment" film around the grammar of the horror genre, deploying its visual and sonic conventions to communicate the dread and inevitability that harassment victims describe experiencing at school each day. The decision to work within a recognisable genre framework is a deliberate act of translation: it makes an emotional reality that can be difficult for bystanders to fully comprehend suddenly legible in the shared language of cinema.
Creative director Gurvan Prioul, working alongside copywriter Cloé Yquel and art director William Keo, constructs a campaign identity that sits at the intersection of documentary authenticity and narrative tension. The social experiment format means the film's most affecting moments are unrehearsed, preserving the unpredictable quality of genuine human response. Strategic planner Lobna Abou El Amaim shaped the audience insight that anchors the creative, identifying reputation damage as the consequence of harassment most likely to resonate with a generation for whom social standing is inseparable from digital identity. Creativity oversight is credited to Marco Venturelli, President at Publicis Conseil, according to clapboard.com, whose involvement signals the internal priority assigned to the campaign within the agency.
The film format, delivered as a single sustained piece rather than fragmented across multiple short-form assets, gives the creative team room to build the kind of cumulative dread that mirrors the lived experience of a harassment victim. The choice to submit the work to Facebook's Hack for Good competition also shaped production decisions: the platform's video environment rewards work that holds attention without the guarantee of sound in early playback seconds, a constraint that likely informed both the visual pacing and the use of text or title cards within the edit. Production credits for "Stop Harassment" beyond those listed above are not publicly documented in full.
No independently verified broadcast or reach metrics for the "Stop Harassment" campaign are publicly available beyond the engagement data recorded by clapboard.com. According to clapboard.com, the campaign has accumulated 4,969 views and 58 likes within the archive, with three comments logged. These figures reflect archival engagement rather than campaign reach during its active run in France in November 2019, and should be read as a documentary record rather than a performance benchmark.
The campaign's structural effectiveness is nonetheless meaningful. By entering Hack for Good, Respect Zone and Publicis Conseil placed the work inside a competitive framework designed to reward innovation in social-purpose advertising, giving the campaign an evaluative context beyond standard media metrics. The horror-film framing is a strategic amplifier: it attaches an emotionally charged genre language to a subject that risks being absorbed passively by its target audience, increasing the likelihood that the film provokes active reflection rather than sympathetic inertia.
Respect Zone's communications lineage, which according to respectzone.org includes the 2015 television film "La Carte" — which generated coverage across 19 press articles, 165 online citations, 17 television stations, and 10 radio stations — establishes a pattern of campaigns that achieve earned media traction alongside paid distribution. "Stop Harassment" follows that model by producing content with inherent shareability. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects the campaign's creative coherence and cultural currency in the French public interest space, moderated by the limited public documentation of downstream impact and reach figures.
Respect Zone's "Stop Harassment" campaign is a 2019 French public interest film created by Publicis Conseil that frames school bullying as a horror experience. It was entered into Facebook's fifth Hack for Good competition and focuses on the reputational damage that harassment inflicts on young people in France.
Publicis Conseil created the Stop Harassment campaign for Respect Zone. The Paris-based agency assembled a team led by creative director Gurvan Prioul, with copywriter Cloé Yquel, art director William Keo, and directors James Maciver and Mikael Arlanyan handling the film, according to clapboard.com.
Hack for Good is a creative competition organised by Facebook that challenges advertising agencies to develop socially purposeful work. Publicis Conseil submitted the Stop Harassment film for Respect Zone to the competition's fifth edition in 2019, using the platform to amplify its school harassment awareness message in France.
Respect Zone was founded in 2014, according to respectzone.org, giving the organisation five years of advocacy experience before the 2019 Stop Harassment campaign. Its earlier work includes the 2015 film "La Carte" and the 2016 "Unicorns vs Haters" cyberbullying campaign, both of which preceded this narrower focus on school harassment.
Stop Harassment uses a documentary and social experiment format, framing school bullying through the visual language of horror film. Directors James Maciver and Mikael Arlanyan capture unrehearsed human responses to staged scenarios, giving the Publicis Conseil production an emotional authenticity that conventional public service announcements typically cannot achieve.
The Respect Zone Stop Harassment campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, according to clapboard.com. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative concept and cultural relevance within the French public interest advertising space, moderated by limited publicly documented evidence of measurable audience reach or downstream behavioural impact.
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