ARCHIVEHow The Aguda Turned a Surrogacy Law Into a National Strike
The Aguda's #ProudStrikers campaign is a July 2018 digital and social-media mobilisation created by BBR Saatchi & Saatchi in Israel, calling on LGBT citizens and allies to stage a one-day nationwide strike in direct response to a Knesset vote that excluded same-sex male couples from equal surrogacy rights.
The campaign launched after the Israeli parliament voted on July 18, 2018 to advance surrogacy legislation that left same-sex male couples without equal access, according to campaignsoftheworld.com. The Aguda, Israel's LGBT Task Force and an organisation founded in 1975 according to brandinginasia.com, responded not with a petition or a protest march but with an act borrowed from the labour movement: a structured, single-day withdrawal from work. The strike was set for July 22, 2018, a date that, as reported by brandinginasia.com, coincided with Tisha B'Av, one of the most solemn fast days in the Jewish calendar, lending the action a layer of cultural and historical resonance that no ordinary demonstration could have achieved.
In Israel, where collective civic memory is shaped by both religious tradition and modern labour history, the choice of format carried immediate communicative weight. The campaign used digital channels and social media as its primary engine, spreading the call to strike through a unified hashtag, #ProudStrikers, that fused the language of workplace solidarity with explicit pride in LGBT identity. The objective was twofold: to demonstrate the economic and social presence of the LGBT community and its supporters within Israeli society, and to create sufficient political pressure to force a reconsideration of the legislation at parliamentary level. The campaign falls squarely within the public interest category and represents one of the most structurally distinctive pieces of LGBT advocacy advertising produced in Israel in 2018.
The Aguda selected a labour-strike format because it translated identity into economic visibility. Rather than appealing to sympathy, #ProudStrikers demanded that Israeli society reckon with the practical, measurable contribution of LGBT people and their allies to the national workforce and economy. The strategic insight was precise: a parliament that had just voted to exclude a community from a fundamental right would find it considerably harder to ignore that community when it was absent from workplaces, businesses, and public life simultaneously.
The timing amplified this logic. By aligning the strike with Tisha B'Av on July 22, 2018, as noted by brandinginasia.com, BBR Saatchi & Saatchi connected the campaign to a national moment of collective reflection, making the LGBT community's grievance legible within a shared cultural framework rather than positioning it as a minority concern separate from mainstream Israeli life. This is a meaningfully different strategic posture from the one taken by comparable campaigns in the region, where LGBT advocacy has historically relied on visibility marches or legal challenges rather than organised economic withdrawal.
The competitive landscape for public interest communications in Israel is relevant context here. According to En Globes Co Il, Israel's Government Advertising Agency, known as LAPAM, increased its actual spending by around thirty percent in 2011, exceeding its approved budget, which signals an environment in which public-interest messaging commands real institutional resource. Commercial public-interest campaigns by NGOs like The Aguda operate alongside that government machinery, typically without equivalent budgets, which makes the earned-media potential of a strike mechanism especially valuable. Organisations such as the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance pursue comparable advocacy goals in Israel, but #ProudStrikers distinguished itself by converting individual sentiment into collective economic action, a model with far higher inherent amplification than a single-organisation statement.
Idan Regev served as chief creative officer on #ProudStrikers, with Yossi Lubaton in the role of CEO at BBR Saatchi & Saatchi, according to campaignsoftheworld.com. The creative team's central decision was formal rather than aesthetic: to make the campaign's primary deliverable not an advertisement but an act. The single media asset at the heart of the campaign existed to announce, explain, and legitimise the strike, not to substitute for it.
That discipline is rarer than it appears in public service communications. Many NGO campaigns in Israel and internationally produce emotionally charged films or striking visuals and then rely on the content itself to generate pressure. #ProudStrikers reversed the hierarchy. The content served the action, and the action generated the content. Every image of empty desks, every social post declaring participation, every news report covering the strike became campaign material that BBR Saatchi & Saatchi did not have to produce or pay for. The hashtag #ProudStrikers functioned as a compact editorial statement, collapsing the tension between labour solidarity and LGBT pride into a single searchable phrase that gave participants a shared identity and gave journalists a ready-made story frame.
The campaign's digital architecture was built around social-media mobilisation, as reported by multivu.com, allowing the strike to be joined, amplified, and documented in real time by participants who became co-creators of the campaign's visible footprint. The Tisha B'Av date added a layer of craft that extended beyond hashtag mechanics: it gave media commentators a culturally specific angle to pursue and placed the LGBT community's exclusion from the surrogacy law within a broader national narrative of collective suffering and remembrance. According to brandinginasia.com, the songwriter Doron Medalie, who had worked with BBR Saatchi & Saatchi for approximately two years by August 2018, was connected to the agency's broader creative ecosystem during this period, reflecting the agency's established practice of drawing on cultural talent to deepen resonance in public-interest work.
ARCHIVENo verified independent performance data for #ProudStrikers is publicly available in the form of audited reach figures or paid-media metrics. According to campaignsoftheworld.com, the campaign reportedly mobilised more than 100,000 people, and according to brandinginasia.com, it contributed to an emergency reconsideration of the surrogacy legislation by Israel's parliament. These are the two most consequential outcomes a public-interest campaign can produce: mass participation and direct policy response. Both are extraordinary for a single-day, digital-first campaign operating within the resource constraints typical of NGO public-service work in Israel.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on three compounding factors. First, the strike format created a participation mechanism with low barriers to entry and high social visibility, which is the optimal condition for viral mobilisation. Second, the Tisha B'Av timing guaranteed mainstream media attention that extended the campaign's reach far beyond the LGBT community's own networks. Third, the unified hashtag gave the campaign a measurable, searchable public identity that persisted after the strike day itself, sustaining pressure on legislators in the days that followed.
Clapboard scores #ProudStrikers at 58 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign with genuine strategic innovation and documented real-world impact, held back by the absence of a richer body of creative assets and the limited public documentation of its full production scope. For a public service campaign operating without commercial media budgets in Israel in 2018, a score of 58 represents meaningful recognition of its structural ambition and civic effectiveness.
#ProudStrikers was a July 2018 digital campaign created by BBR Saatchi & Saatchi for The Aguda, Israel's LGBT Task Force. It called for a one-day nationwide strike on July 22, 2018, in response to a Knesset vote advancing surrogacy legislation that excluded same-sex male couples from equal rights, according to campaignsoftheworld.com.
The Aguda chose a strike to make the LGBT community's economic presence impossible to ignore. Rather than a conventional protest, the one-day withdrawal from work translated identity into collective action with direct political consequences, a strategic approach developed by BBR Saatchi & Saatchi and documented by brandinginasia.com.
BBR Saatchi & Saatchi created #ProudStrikers in Israel in 2018. Yossi Lubaton served as CEO and Idan Regev as chief creative officer on the campaign, according to campaignsoftheworld.com. The campaign was produced for The Aguda, Israel's LGBT Task Force, which was founded in 1975, as reported by brandinginasia.com.
The #ProudStrikers campaign reportedly mobilised more than 100,000 people in Israel on July 22, 2018, according to campaignsoftheworld.com. The strike also contributed to an emergency parliamentary reconsideration of the surrogacy legislation, making it one of the most impactful LGBT public-interest campaigns produced in Israel that year.
Clapboard scores #ProudStrikers at 58 out of 100. The score acknowledges the campaign's genuine strategic innovation and its documented real-world civic impact in Israel, while reflecting the limited public documentation of its full creative production scope and the single-asset digital format it employed.
BBR Saatchi & Saatchi scheduled the #ProudStrikers strike on Tisha B'Av, one of Judaism's most solemn fast days, to embed the LGBT community's exclusion within a shared national narrative of collective suffering. As reported by brandinginasia.com, the date gave Israeli media a culturally resonant angle and broadened the campaign's reach beyond LGBT audiences.
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