The World Cup is a worldwide celebration, however there’s a darker facet to the event.

FIFA predicts some 6.5 million followers will attend video games over the approaching weeks, with almost half coming from abroad. Seattle’s King County Prosecutor’s Human Trafficking Unit not too long ago predicted the event will see a spike in intercourse trafficking and tourism.

Seattle company DNA&STONE (shortlisted for Adweek’s 2025 Agency of the Year) is launching a marketing campaign aimed toward elevating consciousness round intercourse trafficking. Beginning Monday, when Seattle’s Lumen Discipline hosts its first recreation, and lasting at some point of the event, “Poison the Fantasy” consists of broadcast, social, digital show, billboards, projections, and placements round World Cup venues and in bars and eating places on key recreation days. 

Whereas predominantly protecting Seattle, the marketing campaign additionally has nationwide attain in Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

“We have been learn how to influence this difficulty in probably the most direct method doable. We needed to get to the supply. We have to perceive the motivation of the customer—what’s going to actually get in the best way of them taking motion,” company co-founder Alan Brown advised ADWEEK. 

Humanizing the victims on each side was one solution to land hard-hitting messaging. Brown and his colleagues spent the previous 12 months speaking to everybody related to the problem, from cops to pimps, sex-trafficking survivors, and nonprofit and group organizations.

Paired with daring graphics and imagery that mimics the visible fashion of soliciting websites, the digital show and OOH work characteristic real-life testimonials, together with a daughter who mentioned, “My dad was shopping for women my age, 16! He not felt protected to me,” and an ex-wife who mentioned, “Whereas he can by no means escape the truth that he used one other human and paid her for it, I can by no means escape the truth that I married an individual who did that.”

These “Detestimonials,” because the company calls them, present the devastating impact patrons’ actions can have on household and pals. 

“We needed to reduce by way of and attain these patrons in a method that’ll make a distinction, as a result of in any other case it simply turns into wallpaper,” Brown mentioned. “This isn’t supposed to be an anti-commercial intercourse marketing campaign, or anti-men or something—however we try to be provocative within the messaging.”

The marketing campaign is solely professional bono, achieved with no consumer, which required DNA&STONE to collaborate with companions together with The Extra We Love, Dunn Lumber, KIRO/CBS, Pacific Out of doors, and NW Well mannered Society. The OOH work features a QR code directing customers to buysexpayprices.com.