The billboard on the corner of Flinders and AC/DC Lanes, Melbourne.

Client: Australian Childhood Foundation
Title: ‘Invisible’
Agency: JWT Melbourne

I was just about to walk past this ad when I saw the life-sized legs sticking out the bottom and realised the billboard had actually been pasted over a child-sized mannequin. JWT has installed these posters in various parts of Melbourne’s CBD: I’ve seen a photo of another one on Spencer Street opposite Southern Cross station.

It’s a simple and striking way to communicate the message that neglected children are also abused children. My photo doesn’t really do justice to how creepy it looks in real life.

According to the Australian Childhood Foundation’s website, neglect accounted for 30 per cent of reported child abuse cases in Australia in 2006-7, although many children suffer a combination of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. The Foundation stresses that it’s the role of adults to learn how to notice and report child abuse – you might have seen the TV ad in which various adult abusers thank you, the viewer, for letting them get away with it.

A lot of these kinds of charity ads are about “building awareness”, which the ad industry tends to view rather scornfully as a fluffy, non-measurable outcome. If the ad doesn’t have a clear call-to-action, then it’s easy for bitter, jaded agency hacks to write it off as a cynical awards-chaser for the agency that made it, rather than a genuine attempt to use advertising to solve a community problem or do right by the client.

To some extent, we’d be right to be cynical about pro-bono charity ads. Some of them – particularly those involving children – are creative for creativity’s sake, and their deliberately envelope-pushing concepts and overly sentimental executions almost seem to exploit the subject of the charity further, rather than encouraging people to help. We need only look at Adam Hunt’s unrepentant response to critics of his controversial Gruen Transfer TVC to see how muddy the ethical waters of charity advertising are.

But this ad is precisely about “building awareness”; that is, noticing things. Considering that so much outdoor advertising is clutter that we encounter daily without really thinking much about it, it’s kind of a triumph that JWT turned ‘cut-through’ – getting people simply to notice their ad – into their client’s call-to-action. If you’ve noticed the kid sticking out of the billboard, you’ve already started acquiring the skills to notice neglected kids in your own neighbourhood.

Even the inevitable vandalism was channelled into the call-to-action: when the mannequin was ripped out of the billboard, a second message was revealed: “Thank you for seeing me”.

That said, I’m not sure how many people who saw this ad would look up the website, which is where you’ll see all the practical information about how to spot child neglect. It’s a powerful illustration of the problem, for sure, but it needs an equally powerful illustration of the solution.