Flash Drives for Freedom wins Best Cause Campaign at the Webbys
Voted the Best Cause-Related Campaign in the People’s Voice category of the 24th annual Webby Awards, out of nearly 13,000 entries.
Some organizations defend human rights in general. The Human Rights Foundation goes after the thing that crushes them: tyranny. This spring HRF brought Buena its first brief, and it pointed at the most sealed-off country on earth. Doug Burnett, Buena’s founder, became HRF’s creative director the same year, and the work hasn’t stopped since.
A country with no internet, no foreign mail and no calls abroad
North Koreans have no internet, no foreign mail and no way to phone the outside world. The only news they hear comes from the state, and the Kim regime depends on that silence.
HRF has worked with North Korean defectors and refugees since 2009, hosting them at its Oslo Freedom Forum and helping their efforts to send information home. Those groups had found a crack in the wall: USB drives loaded with films, soap operas, books and Wikipedia, moved in through smuggling networks on the Chinese border. A drive is small, easy to hide and easy to pass from hand to hand.
What the brief started from
- A few thousanddrives a year, bought at retailDefector groups paid full price for every drive they sent north, which held the flow to a few thousand a year.
- 2009the year HRF began working with North Korean defectorsHosting them at the Oslo Freedom Forum and helping them send information into the country.
The problem was supply
The limit wasn’t courage or networks. It was money. The defector groups bought every drive at retail, which held them to a few thousand a year. Meanwhile, most of us have an old drive or two sitting forgotten in a junk drawer.
So the brief came down to one question: how do you get millions of people to hand over the drives they no longer use, and feel good doing it?
Most of us have a drive in a drawer. In North Korea, it’s a window.
What it became
The answer opened at the Oslo Freedom Forum on May 24, 2016: Flash Drives for Freedom, made with Leo Burnett Chicago, a wall of Kim Jong-un faces with USB ports for mouths. Plug in a drive and his propaganda goes quiet. It toured from SXSW to Seoul, John Oliver gave it a segment, the regime denounced it by name, and in 2020 it won a Webby.
The partnership kept growing from there.
A brand built on tyranny
In 2019 we rebranded HRF around one focus and one line: When we rise, tyranny falls.
The Oslo Freedom Forum
The forum’s new identity turned HRF’s lines into redaction bars, for Oslo and every city edition.
COVIDCon
In 2020, a virtual conference on how dictators sparked the pandemic, made in three weeks. Over 6,000 people came.
Empty Box
In 2021, with the Lantos Foundation, a site that sent 15 dictators away from their Olympic box seats.
It all started with a junk drawer and a sealed border, and a foundation that wanted the world to see what tyranny hides.
