"A playful and personalized tool to highlight the global impact of our fixation with having more. What we consider 'essential' to everyday living quickly shifts to excess while going through the process." —juror Kelly Goto
"A sobering look at how the way we live affects those in more vulnerable communities. A fun and engaging interface invites visitors to explore a grave subject matter." —juror Kim Rees
Overview: There are more slaves bought and sold today than at any point in human history. Unfortunately few people know. This site establishes a direct connection between a consumer and the underlying slavery in their supply chains with reams of State Department research made compelling, approachable and relevant. Created in HTML5 to be accessible from computers, laptops and tablets, all content is built around a single, provocative question, "How many slaves work for you?," and an engaging eleven-question survey that increases awareness and activates consumers.
• From agency brief to launch, this eight-month-long project included three months of internal concepting and design and five months of production and development.
• Starting with dry statistics and slavery input calculations, the challenge was broken into three parts: how to get a consumer's data; how to process it; and how to provide meaningful results.
• Apps for iOS and Android encourage people to offset their footprint on the move.
Comments by John Matejczyk:
Was the topic of the project new to you? "My wife and I were becoming increasingly aware of the global slave trade through speakers at our church in Berkeley. So when this project came up, our agency jumped at the chance to unleash our creativity on the issue."
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? "It would be impossible to describe the intensity and endurance it took to pull this off. We were on a 24-hour development cycle between us in San Francisco and Unit9 in London and during launch, we had producers going sleepless for 48 hour shifts. There was weeping."
What would you do differently if you could start the project over? "It's impossible to predict success, but we would have prepared for significant global use. Our prediction was 150,000 survey completions in the first year. We got 55,000 hits in the first hour—crashing the site. As soon as we got back up, we got 1,000,000 completions in under a month. At the time of this writing, two months in, we've raced past 2,000,000."
