'Asking For It' OOH Campaign Encourages Passers-by to Tear Down Victim Blaming Posters

While more Canadians than ever before consider themselves feminists, only 6% of women who have been harassed have had the help of someone else intervening on their behalf.

That insight spurred the teams at L’Oréal Paris Canada, Right to Be (an organisation dedicated to a harassment-free world) and McCann Montreal to work together to break the cycle and ensure that those who witness any kind of harassment will intervene in the future. In order to empower individuals to intervene when witnessing street harassment, L’Oréal Paris Canada and Right to Be created the Stand Up initiative. The program offers a proven set of tools to help people safely intervene when they are a victim or witness to harassment in public spaces. To activate effectively on the idea, L’Oreal Paris Canada and Right to Be collaborated with McCann Montreal to come up with a creative solution to the problem: forcing people to act by outraging them with the rousing sentiment that victims of street harassment are 'Asking for It.'

To provoke action and launch the campaign, the collective team installed posters in high-traffic areas across Canada that feature victim-blaming rhetoric (i.e. 'Asking for It'), encouraging passers-by to rip down the posters in anger. When they do, new posters are revealed underneath to encourage them to get training to stand up to street harassment by following QR codes that lead people directly to Stand Up training sessions on the organisation’s website.

“As the world's number one beauty brand, it is our responsibility to continue to stand up against street harassment in Canada, and we feel grateful to be in such a position to be able to elevate this cause to be our top priority on L'Oréal Paris,” said Edouard Hottebart, general manager, L’Oréal Paris Canada. “We knew it was the right way to combat the problem by making it incumbent on all of us – not just the immediate victim – to fight against street harassment anytime and everywhere they see it. Our goal is to drive half a million Canadians to take the 10-minute training and learn how to stand up against street harassment safely. It is only the beginning of our accelerated efforts for the program in Canada for 2023.”

Dave Roberts, executive creative director at McCann Montreal adds, “The creative is purposefully provocative in order to draw attention, but also to make people realise that if they don’t agree with these statements, then they should divert their anger into being part of the solution.”

The campaign launched during International Anti Street Harassment Week (April 16-April 22nd) and will run for four weeks on digital, social, and out of home across Canada.

Get involved in the training here.