Trump's Tearrible Wall Miami Ad School's 2017 Donation Drive
Trump's Tearrible Wall is a 2017 digital public interest campaign created by Miami Ad School in Canada that presents a destructible digital wall — a direct metaphor for the proposed US–Mexico border wall — which breaks apart incrementally each time a user donates to an institution whose funding was perceived to be at risk from federal budget reallocation, according to Lieu House Gov.
The campaign was published in July 2017 and emerged from a specific political moment: the debate over redirecting federal resources toward a proposed border wall estimated, as noted in the campaign's own framing, at a cost of twenty-five billion US dollars. Art director Runda Dong and copywriters Maddie Rosenberg and Evelyne Wyss — all students at Miami Ad School, Toronto — built the concept around a simple psychological tension: citizens felt genuine outrage but lacked a clear, constructive outlet for it. Trump's Tearrible Wall proposed to resolve that tension by converting anger into measurable charitable impact.
In Canada, where public discourse around US political decisions carries cross-border cultural weight, the campaign found a natural home. The digital medium allowed the work to travel beyond any single geographic boundary, though its publication context and creative origin remain firmly rooted in the Canadian market, according to Miamiadschool. The single media asset at the centre of the campaign functioned as both an interactive fundraising mechanism and a piece of visual commentary — the wall's progressive destruction providing donors with immediate, satisfying feedback that their contribution had a tangible effect, according to Mavcor Yale Edu. The campaign sits within the Public Interest category, a classification that reflects its civic rather than commercial intent, and carries a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, according to Usnews.
Trump's Tearrible Wall identifies a specific consumer insight: political helplessness. The campaign's strategic premise holds that large numbers of people wanted to respond meaningfully to the proposed border wall but could not identify a personal action with sufficient weight to feel consequential, according to Nyfadvertising. The creative solution reframes donation — already an established civic behaviour — as an act of political resistance, giving it emotional charge it would not otherwise carry.
This approach reflects a broader pattern in public interest advertising, where the most effective work does not simply inform audiences of a problem but provides them with an immediate, low-friction path to action. In Canada, civic engagement campaigns operate in a media environment shaped by both domestic and American political discourse, making US policy debates a legitimate creative territory for Canadian advertising students addressing global audiences. Weber Shandwick's research into advocacy communications, as reported by Provoke Media, has consistently noted that audiences respond more durably to campaigns that offer agency rather than passive awareness — a principle Trump's Tearrible Wall applies directly.
The competitive landscape for student public interest work in 2017 included campaigns from schools such as VCU Brandcenter and School of Visual Arts, both of which produced socially engaged digital work that cycle through award circuit consideration. Miami Ad School's Toronto campus positioned this campaign within that peer field, though no entries in the Cannes Lions, D&AD, Clio Awards, One Show, or Webby Awards databases have been identified for this specific work. GroupM forecast global advertising expenditure at approximately US$547.4 billion in 2017, with digital representing a growing share of that total, according to GroupM's annual forecast — context that underscores how much creative competition existed in the digital public interest space during the campaign's publication window.
Runda Dong served as art director on Trump's Tearrible Wall, with Maddie Rosenberg and Evelyne Wyss sharing copywriting responsibilities — a three-person student team at Miami Ad School, Toronto, working within the constraints and freedoms of an academic brief rather than a client-driven production pipeline.
The creative execution centres on a single digital asset, and the discipline of that constraint is itself a creative choice. Rather than distributing the message across multiple formats, the campaign concentrates its entire argument — visual, verbal, and mechanical — into one interactive experience. The wall graphic functions as both the subject of the campaign's critique and its primary interface. As donations accumulate, the wall degrades, transforming a symbol of division and contested public expenditure into something that literally comes apart under collective civic pressure. The wordplay embedded in the campaign title — Tearrible, combining tear as in weeping or ripping and terrible as a political judgment — demonstrates the kind of compressed verbal intelligence that strong public interest copywriting demands. Maddie Rosenberg and Evelyne Wyss deploy that pun at the title level, ensuring the concept is communicated before a user has engaged with the interactive element itself.
Production credits beyond the named creative team are not publicly documented for this campaign. What the available record confirms is that the work was conceived and executed as a student project, which shapes the production context: the asset reflects the resources and tools available within an ad school environment, prioritising conceptual clarity over production scale. That prioritisation is appropriate to the brief — in public interest advertising, the idea must carry more weight than the execution budget, and Trump's Tearrible Wall is structured accordingly.
No verified performance data for Trump's Tearrible Wall is publicly available. No published donation totals, reach figures, earned media volume, or engagement metrics have been identified in publicly accessible sources, and no entries for this campaign appear in the Cannes Lions, Effies, D&AD, One Show, Clio Awards, or Webby Awards databases. Coverage from trade publications including Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, and Contagious has not been indexed for this work.
Structural analysis, however, reveals a campaign built around several characteristics associated with effective public interest digital work. The feedback loop — donate, watch the wall crumble — is immediate and visually rewarding, which reduces the psychological distance between intent and action that typically suppresses charitable conversion rates. The campaign's reliance on a single, highly shareable digital asset is consistent with the resource profile of a student project while also reflecting sound strategic instinct: a focused execution is more likely to travel intact across social platforms than a fragmented multi-asset campaign.
The Clapboard Score for Trump's Tearrible Wall is 63 out of 100, a rating that reflects the campaign's conceptual coherence and topical relevance while accounting for the absence of documented real-world impact and the limited production scope inherent to student work. The campaign's durability as an archival reference — it remains indexed and catalogued nearly eight years after its July 2017 publication in Canada — suggests it retains instructional and creative value within the Miami Ad School legacy and the broader public interest advertising canon.
Trump's Tearrible Wall is a 2017 digital public interest campaign created by Miami Ad School students in Canada. It presents an interactive digital wall that breaks apart each time a user donates to an institution whose funding was seen as threatened by proposed US border wall expenditure, converting political frustration into charitable action.
Trump's Tearrible Wall was created by a three-person Miami Ad School, Toronto team. Runda Dong served as art director, and Maddie Rosenberg and Evelyne Wyss were the copywriters. The campaign was produced as a student project and published in Canada in July 2017 within the Public Interest category.
The campaign used a single digital asset depicting a wall that degraded incrementally with each donation to an endangered institution. Users received immediate visual feedback as the wall crumbled, linking their personal financial contribution directly to the symbolic destruction of the proposed US–Mexico border wall and its associated funding debate.
No awards for Trump's Tearrible Wall have been identified in publicly available records. Searches of the Cannes Lions, D&AD, Clio Awards, One Show, Effies, and Webby Awards databases returned no entries for this campaign. The work carries a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting its conceptual strength within a student production context.
Trump's Tearrible Wall was published in Canada because it originated from Miami Ad School's Toronto campus, where Runda Dong, Maddie Rosenberg, and Evelyne Wyss were studying. In Canada, US political debates carry significant cross-border cultural resonance, making the proposed border wall a relevant creative territory for a Canadian-based student public interest campaign.
The campaign directed donations toward institutions described as endangered by the proposed reallocation of federal funding toward the US–Mexico border wall. The campaign's framing contrasted the wall's projected cost against the funding needs of these institutions, though a specific named list of recipient organisations is not publicly documented in available sources.
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