Valentin Haüy Association's 'A Job for Me' campaign, created by We Are Social France in 2023, uses a humorous film to expose the 70% unemployment rate among
Valentin Haüy Association Turns Workplace Exclusion Into a Comic Mirror
"A Job for Me" is a 2023 integrated public service campaign created by We Are Social France for the Valentin Haüy Association, using a humorous short film to expose the systematic employment barriers faced by blind and visually impaired people in France, launched during European Disability Employment Week, November 20–26, 2023.
The campaign confronts a stark social reality. In France, according to the Valentin Haüy Association's 2023 annual report, approximately 70% of working-age visually impaired individuals are without employment — a figure the association describes as alarming and one that underscores the distance between legal obligation and lived experience. The Valentin Haüy Association, which per Avh Asso has been supporting visually impaired people for more than 130 years, deployed this campaign to move both the general public and recruitment professionals toward meaningful action on equal employment opportunity.
The campaign operates as a single integrated media asset — a film that adopts the conventions of documentary and social experiment to dramatise everyday absurdities: job advertisements inaccessible to visually impaired candidates, and companies' evident reluctance to hire them. By choosing humour as its primary instrument, We Are Social France sidesteps the fatigue that often accompanies more solemn disability advocacy and invites broader audiences into the conversation. The timing of the launch, precisely within European Disability Employment Week, gave the campaign a ready-made platform of public and institutional attention across France and, by extension, across European markets where the same week is observed. The Valentin Haüy Association used the campaign to direct audiences toward its professional reintegration programmes and accessible training offerings, translating awareness into a concrete pathway for action.
France maintains a legal requirement compelling employers with twenty or more employees to ensure that disabled workers constitute at least six percent of their total workforce, according to Service-Public Gouv. The gap between that statutory obligation and the reality documented by the Valentin Haüy Association — where roughly 70% of visually impaired working-age people in France remain unemployed, per avh.asso.fr — forms the precise strategic fault line that "A Job for Me" exploits.
We Are Social France recognised that awareness campaigns in the disability employment space frequently address audiences already converted to the cause. The agency's decision to lead with humour rather than pathos was a deliberate attempt to reach recruiters, hiring managers, and general audiences who might otherwise scroll past a conventionally earnest public service film. In the French public interest advertising landscape, campaigns such as those produced by Agefiph — the national fund for the professional integration of disabled workers, described by agefiph.fr as the central financing body for disability employment in France — set a recognised institutional benchmark. By anchoring the campaign to European Disability Employment Week, We Are Social France aligned with a moment when media coverage and employer attention are both demonstrably elevated, giving the film a structural advantage over year-round advocacy content.
The strategic brief also drew on the Valentin Haüy Association's existing infrastructure. Per avh.asso.fr, the association operates through 125 committees, branches, and correspondences across France as of 2022, providing a distribution network capable of amplifying the film's reach beyond paid media. This combination of institutional credibility, comedic creative differentiation, and precise calendar placement represents the core of the campaign's strategic architecture in the French market.
"A Job for Me" adopts the grammar of the social experiment film — a format familiar to French audiences from both journalistic television and social media documentary content. The creative team at We Are Social France used this grammar to generate friction: real-world employment scenarios rendered absurd by applying the barriers visually impaired candidates routinely face, presented with a comedic lightness that sustains viewer engagement where a more didactic approach might provoke defensiveness.
The film's central mechanism is contrast. Humour in this context does not diminish the seriousness of the subject; it amplifies the irrationality of employer behaviour and the inaccessibility of standard hiring processes by making them legible to audiences who have never encountered them personally. The choice of a documentary-adjacent aesthetic — naturalistic lighting, observational framing, the implied presence of an unseen camera — lends the comedy an edge of authenticity that pure sketch formats lack. This hybridity between social experiment and scripted humour is consistent with We Are Social's wider creative positioning as a socially-led agency, a descriptor the agency uses across its international network communications, per wearesocial.com.
Production credits for "A Job for Me" are not publicly documented in available sources. What the available evidence does confirm, per wearesocial.com, is that the campaign was deployed programmatically and through acquisition channels between November 14 and 26, 2023, suggesting a media production and distribution process managed to meet the European Disability Employment Week window. The integration of a single media asset across multiple distribution channels — rather than a multi-asset content suite — reflects a focused creative discipline that concentrates audience attention on one clearly constructed argument rather than dispersing it across formats.
"A Job for Me" generated documented performance data across its activation window. According to wearesocial.com, the campaign achieved seven million programmatic impressions, two million acquisition impressions, 51,000 clicks, and 20,000 unique landing-page visitors between November 14 and 26, 2023. These figures cover the period immediately preceding and running through European Disability Employment Week in France, confirming that the media strategy successfully concentrated delivery within the intended cultural moment.
No verified campaign-attributable data on donations lift, changes to employer hiring behaviour, or brand-tracking metrics for the Valentin Haüy Association is publicly available for this campaign. The reach numbers, however, indicate meaningful penetration for a single-asset public service campaign operating in France without the budget architecture typical of commercial advertisers. Reaching seven million programmatic impressions through a focused two-week window — and converting that reach into 20,000 unique landing-page visits — suggests the creative's click-through efficiency was a functional asset, not merely an aesthetic one.
The campaign has not been recognised in Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, D&AD, The One Show, the Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards as of the time of writing. Clapboard rates "A Job for Me" at 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its public interest brief with structural intelligence and creative differentiation, while remaining constrained by the resource and distribution limits inherent to single-asset non-profit campaigns in the French market.
"A Job for Me" is a 2023 public service campaign created by We Are Social France for the Valentin Haüy Association. The film uses humour and documentary conventions to expose the employment barriers facing blind and visually impaired people in France, launching during European Disability Employment Week in November 2023.
We Are Social France chose humour to reach audiences beyond existing disability advocates. The comedic social-experiment format makes irrational employer behaviour legible to recruiters and general viewers who might disengage from more solemn public service messaging, broadening the campaign's effective reach in the French market.
According to wearesocial.com, the campaign generated seven million programmatic impressions, two million acquisition impressions, 51,000 clicks, and 20,000 unique landing-page visitors between November 14 and 26, 2023, across France. No donation-lift or employer-behaviour data is publicly available for this campaign.
The Valentin Haüy Association states that approximately 70% of working-age visually impaired people in France are unemployed, according to avh.asso.fr. This figure anchors the campaign's argument and contextualises the gap between France's legal six-percent disabled-workforce quota and actual hiring practice.
The campaign launched in November 2023 during European Disability Employment Week, observed November 20–26. That timing gave We Are Social France a concentrated window of institutional and media attention in France, aligning the film's release with peak public and employer awareness of disability employment issues.
No awards for "A Job for Me" have been recorded at Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, Effie Awards, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards as of the time of writing. Clapboard rates the campaign 63 out of 100, recognising its strategic focus and creative differentiation within the public interest category.
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