Death Gold by DM9 for the Urihi Yanomami Association used 50 seized illegal gold bars engraved with death certificates to expose the human cost of illegal
ARCHIVEDeath Gold Turns Seized Illegal Gold Bars Into Yanomami Death Certificates
Death Gold is a 2025 public interest campaign created by DM9 for the Urihi Yanomami Association in Brazil, in which 50 police-seized illegal gold bars were manually engraved with the death certificates of Yanomami people who died from contamination, violence, or neglect linked to illegal gold mining.
The campaign operates as both physical installation and documentary record. Each bar carries the name, cause of death, and personal data of an individual Yanomami victim, transforming a commodity extracted through criminal activity into an undeniable ledger of human cost. The work was photographed and exhibited across seven major markets identified as significant importers of Brazilian illegal gold: Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Germany, and India. By carrying the evidence into the financial and trade capitals that absorb this material, the campaign implicates not only the miners operating illegally in Yanomami territory but also the global supply chains that give illegal gold its economic value.
In Brazil, where illegal gold mining in Indigenous territories has intensified pressure on some of the most biodiverse and culturally significant land in the Amazon, the Urihi Yanomami Association sought a communication vehicle capable of reaching international audiences and demanding accountability for mineral traceability. DM9, working in São Paulo, structured the campaign as an integrated piece with a single, concentrated media asset — the bars themselves — from which all exhibition, photography, and documentary content flows. The campaign was published in May 2025 and carries a Clapboard Score of 82 out of 100, reflecting strong creative and strategic execution within the public service category.
The Urihi Yanomami Association grounds Death Gold in a documented crisis. Illegal gold mining, known in Brazil as garimpo ilegal, has driven mercury contamination into Yanomami rivers and food systems, with the consequences catalogued across years of public health reporting and Indigenous advocacy. The strategic logic of the campaign is to make that causality visible in the physical form of the commodity itself — not through abstraction or statistics, but through the material object that drives the violence.
Death Gold extends a lineage of advocacy work that the Urihi Yanomami Association and its agency partners have developed since at least 2023. The Cost of Gold, a prior campaign created by DM9 DDB for the association and published in March 2023, used the symbolism of the Oscar statuette and the Yanomami protective deity Omama to connect gold consumption with Yanomami deaths, as documented by Clapboard. Death Gold advances this strategic commitment from symbolic reference to forensic evidence: real bars, real names, real causes of death.
The competitive context for public interest campaigns in Brazil is significant. Organisations including Greenpeace Brasil and Survival International operate in adjacent advocacy territory, often producing image-led environmental communications. What distinguishes Death Gold is the decision to use legally seized physical evidence — objects with prosecutorial provenance — as the primary medium, lending the campaign an evidentiary authority that digitally produced imagery cannot replicate. Brazil's advertising market itself is expanding rapidly. Digital advertising investment in Brazil reached R$42.7 billion in 2025, a 12.7% increase from 2024, according to IAB Brasil figures reported by Folha de S.Paulo. Within that environment, a campaign built entirely around physical objects and documentary photography represents a deliberate counter-logic: materiality as message in a market saturated with digital signal.
Death Gold achieves its impact through an act of careful, manual craft. Fifty gold bars, each seized by police from illegal mining operations in Yanomami territory in Brazil, were individually engraved with the death certificates of Yanomami individuals whose deaths are attributed to the contamination, violence, or institutional neglect that illegal gold mining produces. The engraving process preserves the bars' identity as financial objects while permanently inscribing them with the human cost they represent — a formal tension that gives the work its conceptual precision.
The bars were then photographed as exhibition objects and displayed across seven countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Germany, and India. This geographic distribution of the physical work was itself a strategic creative decision, placing the evidence in proximity to the financial systems and commodity markets that receive illegally extracted Brazilian gold. The exhibition format allowed each local audience to encounter the bars as objects with weight, texture, and inscription — qualities that photography alone partially conveys but that the installation makes immediate.
The campaign was created by DM9 in São Paulo and published in May 2025. According to Meio & Mensagem, one of Brazil's principal trade publications covering the advertising and communications industry, the campaign drew significant attention within the Brazilian market upon its release. Júnior Hekurari, a prominent Yanomami leader and public advocate, is documented in lineage reporting by Clapboard as a figure associated with the association's broader advocacy communications. Production credits for Death Gold beyond the DM9 agency attribution and its client relationship with the Urihi Yanomami Association are not fully detailed in publicly available documentation at the time of writing.
ARCHIVEDeath Gold received formal recognition at Cannes Lions 2025. The campaign was awarded a Silver Lion in the Print and Publishing category and a Bronze Lion in the Outdoor category, according to reporting by Bandt and confirmed by Cannes Lions official communications. Both awards were subsequently withdrawn. On June 27, 2025, Cannes Lions confirmed the withdrawal of both Lions on the grounds that the entry's legitimacy did not meet the required standard, as reported by Bandt and Merca20.
No verified performance data measuring reach, audience engagement, or advocacy outcomes for Death Gold is publicly available at the time of writing. The structural effectiveness of the campaign, however, is legible in its architecture. By confining the entire creative system to a single, verifiable physical medium — 50 engraved seized gold bars — Death Gold eliminates the credibility gap that afflicts many public interest campaigns built on illustrative or speculative imagery. The work is self-evidencing: the bars existed, the engraving was performed, and the exhibition in seven international markets is documented. That evidentiary structure gave the campaign sufficient standing to enter and initially succeed at Cannes Lions, the advertising industry's most scrutinised global competition.
The withdrawal of both Lions introduces a contested dimension to the campaign's legacy. Per Cannes Lions and reporting by Bandt and Merca20, the disqualification was procedural rather than creative — related to entry legitimacy standards rather than any public challenge to the campaign's strategic or craft quality. Within Brazil's public service advertising landscape, Death Gold remains a substantive example of how physical evidence, documentary form, and international distribution can be combined to extend an Indigenous rights advocacy message beyond domestic audiences.
Death Gold is a 2025 public interest campaign created by DM9 for the Urihi Yanomami Association in Brazil. Fifty police-seized illegal gold bars were manually engraved with death certificates of Yanomami people who died from contamination, violence, or neglect linked to illegal gold mining, then exhibited across seven countries.
DM9 created Death Gold for the Urihi Yanomami Association. The campaign was published in Brazil in May 2025. DM9 had previously worked with the same client on The Cost of Gold in March 2023, making Death Gold a continuation of a documented multi-year advocacy strategy against illegal gold mining in Yanomami territory.
Cannes Lions withdrew both the Silver Lion in Print and Publishing and the Bronze Lion in Outdoor on June 27, 2025. According to Cannes Lions, as reported by Bandt and Merca20, the withdrawal was because the entry's legitimacy did not meet the required standard, not because of any stated challenge to the campaign's creative quality.
Death Gold was photographed and exhibited in Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Germany, and India. These markets were selected as major importers of Brazilian illegal gold, placing the engraved bars in direct proximity to the financial and commodity systems the campaign holds accountable.
Death Gold uses 50 police-seized illegal gold bars as its medium, engraving each with a Yanomami victim's death certificate. The campaign directly implicates illegal gold mining, known as garimpo ilegal in Brazil, in Yanomami deaths caused by mercury contamination, violence, and neglect — demanding accountability across the global gold supply chain.
Death Gold received a Clapboard Score of 82 out of 100. This score reflects strong creative and strategic execution within the public service category, recognising the campaign's use of physical evidentiary objects, its international exhibition reach across seven countries, and its integration of documentary form with Indigenous rights advocacy in Brazil.
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