Show, don’t tell – Embody the message
“Actions speak louder than words” is a well-known saying. This counts for campaign tactics too.
When a campaign has analyzed and chosen its core action message (what is known by theorists as the “meta-verb”, such as “disrupt”, “resist”, “confront”, etc.), the best campaign tactic is to not only say it out loud, but find a protest action that actually EMBODIES this verb.
Die-ins are a good example of embodiment of resistance, but there are many more examples.
Another good example is when protesters surrounded Walmart stores in toxic waste suites and cordoned them off, to represent big corporate stores as a disease.
In a similar perspective, activists have chained themselves to prison gates to ask for an innocent’s liberation.
When a giant fence was built in Quebec city to protect the negotiating conference of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, back in 2001, protesters underlined the situation by building a mock medieval siege in front of the fence.
More recently, WWF used Snapchat, an instant messaging service where messages are erased after a very short moment, to create a powerful campaign alerting on the fact that some animal species too are being erased rapidly.
In all of these cases, the format of the protest action carries in itself the message of the campaign.
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