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Circular argument
against violence

Posters wrapped around poles show a soldier's gun

By Toni Fitzgerald
Jul 1, 2009

At its best, alternative media can take the most ordinary medium or venue and with a little imagination turn it into something extraordinary, with its own unique message.

Nothing quite captures that like a recent campaign against violence generally and the Iraq War in particular for the Global Coalition for Peace by its New York agency, Big Ant International.

It was done as a series of posters that were wrapped around telephone and utility polls.

What made the campaign so unique was that the posters incorporated the shape of the poles in the creative message.

The theme, as well as the tagline: what goes around comes around.

One poster shows a soldier looking through the sight of a gun with an extra-long barrel that stretches around the pole so that it's pointing at the back of the soldier.

Another shows a fighter plane firing rockets that circle the pole and are headed toward the rear of the plane.

Under each image are the words "What goes around comes around” and “Stop the Iraq War.”

The message was one of karma, the Buddhist notion that all human actions have consequences, or as we in the West would say, what goes around comes around.

“We came up with a simple and elegant outdoor campaign that focused on the spiraling cycle of war, reminding viewers that the violence perpetrated abroad will breed the hatred that fuels tomorrow's violence — that what goes around, comes around,” says Jeseok Yi, art director for Big Ant International, which executed the campaign.

“To achieve peace, then, we must end the violence, and end the war in Iraq.”

It took a year for Big Ant to come up with the idea for the wraparound posters and four months to finish the art direction and design. The agency wanted to illustrate the concept of karma in a unique way it had not seen before.

Earlier this year, the posters were hung in narrowly targeted neighborhoods in San Francisco and Manhattan where the agency thought passersby would be most likely to make a donation to the Global Coalition for Peace or volunteer for the cause.

Because of its low budget, Big Ant couldn’t produce many posters, so it also targeted the web by sending pictures of the campaign to activist sites like The Inspiration Room, where so far nearly 300 comments have been logged about the campaign.

“While we were installing the campaign on the street, everyone stopped and got surprised. Some of them actually asked us to buy bunch of copies of posters and some of them actually helped us to install them,” Yi says. “We still get tons of emails about this project.”

Yi says donations and volunteers for the Coalition for Peace have increased since the posters went up as well.

Toni Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Media Life.	© 2009 Media Life Magazine

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