In 2015 we worked with the Madrid City Hall to present its Cleaning Plan and create an information and awareness raising campaign for the general public on cleanliness in public spaces. The objective was to bring about both a change in perception of what is common and a change of habits for a cleaner and more pleasant city. The awareness raising campaign sought to turn around the detached attitude towards those places that belong to all of us who inhabit them day in and day out, but sometimes are careless with them. 

In order to be a clean city, in addition to being cleaned often, Madrid needs people’s engagement and ongoing attachment to the city. When they they acknowledged as an extension of your own home, you feel that the city’s public spaces are your own and share the responsibility for keeping them clean. 

We are aware that changing habits is probably the biggest challenge one can face in a communication campaign. Changing behavior is very different from changing intentions, assumptions or attitudes, and a run of the mill campaign won’t do the trick. This is why we intended to apply creativity in the public policies themselves and envisage them as messages unto themselves.  This enabled us to build a much more solid and effective narrative to be integrated into the surroundings in the long term, including educational programs, the design of incentives and compromises and the way in which people interact with them.

We planned for a 2-year strategy with two layers of communication. The duration of the campaign’s pieces was made to fit the media plan and keep pace with current events. It was a campaign that was there to stay.

The first was hybrid and took place in the city in the form of several sub-layers and formats: shops, projections, banners, buses, bus shelters, big screens in the Plaza de Callao. And those layers were replicated in digital format, through small, fragmented by understandable messages, micro-narratives providing feedback from what was happening on the street. 

 The second was conducted in parallel but moved at a different pace. Our idea was to speak from a more unusual standpoint, a less familiar place that wasn’t associated with advertising messages or government messages. The very nature of the place would free passers-by of their consumer, user or voter lenses. We wanted to create an enduring campaign. So we decided to design new signs for the city to be placed in its streets and plazas. And these signs would be part of the normal urban landscape and its fittings. 

This signage is as gentle and complicit as it is incisive in raising our awareness of the need for a clean city. Aníbal Hernández was our illustrator and we used garbage trucks to continue the story as they drove around the city. We used garbage bins that showed us the advantages of common sense, portable ask trays, signs on waste paper bins indicating how close they were, bins that inform about what it means to simply be a good neighbor... Messages to remain out there in just the place they need to be in order to be seen.

Seven years have passed since, and to our surprise, the signs are still out there, enduring in their invitation to engage in taking care of the city, of the spaces that belong to us all. 7 years later the campaign lives on.