We all remember the harrowing “Look them in the eyes” (LTITE) messaging campaign of early 2021, aimed at levering compliance with Covid restrictions. By means of a series of videos and posters, we were confronted with close-up images of acutely unwell patients in intensive care units, ominous music and a voiceover beseeching us to tell them, nose-to-nose, that we never break the rules. Deploying materials that were heavily infused with behavioural science strategies (‘nudges’), frightening and shaming an already overly scared population into obedience, this advertising initiative was widely considered to be the most controversial – and unethical – of all the public health communications during the Covid event. But who were the key actors responsible for inflicting the LTITE campaign on the populace?
My recently published research has revealed the identities of those culpable for arguably the most emotionally disturbing assault by state-funded public health technocrats upon the British people. By scrutinising the documented outputs of potentially key actors (politicians, civil servants, advisory groups, advertising executives and prominent behavioural scientists), together with over 40 original Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to Government departments, four players centrally involved in the production of LTITE have been identified.
MullenLowe advertising agency
On January 21st 2021, the Government announced the introduction of the new LTITE Covid communications campaign, describing how it represented a shift in tone from previous pandemic messaging towards “encouraging people to take personal responsibility and consider the impact of their behaviour on others”. The same YouGov document also identified MullenLowe as the advertising agency commissioned to create the LTITE videos and posters. The contractual arrangement was a lucrative one, MullenLowe receiving £16 million of taxpayers money in 2020 and a further £40 million for the year August 2021 to August 2022. In keeping with these extraordinarily high payments, Tom Knox (executive partner at MullenLowe and longest serving member of their Covid response team) stated that the pandemic constituted the “biggest U.K. advertising campaign since the Second World War”.
The MullenLowe website provides further details of the advertising agency’s prominent role in the genesis of the LTITE project. Based on its own commissioned research that had suggested 20% of the population underestimated the risk of COVID-19, it strove to “make the risk real for those who were unsure or didn’t believe it” by focusing on the people who had “experienced the very worst of the pandemic”. Following the imposition of the second lockdown in January 2021, MullenLowe’s overarching goal was to get people to stay at home.
And it is clear that the creators of these harrowing videos and posters are immensely proud of their work. Citing HM Government’s astrological computer-modelling predictions as the information source, they claim that “‘Look them in the eyes’ was a critical part of the COVID-19 campaign, which is estimated to have prevented between 1.5-1.8 million infections between April-December 2020, saving between 22,629-27,658 lives”. Clearly, MullenLowe – in its self-congratulatory myopia – failed to consider the extensive fear-related collateral death toll in their appraisal (for example, consequent to people being too scared to attend hospital with other illnesses, and elderly people being abandoned to die prematurely of loneliness and neglect). Furthermore, given that their campaign was not launched until January 2021, the time span of the HM Government’s speculative figures renders the LTITE initiative irrelevant.
Conrad Bird – senior civil servant
Conrad Bird is Director of Campaigns and Marketing at the Cabinet Office, and – by his own admission – was centrally involved in the development of nudge-infused messaging during Covid. In November 2020, prior to the LTITE campaign, Bird celebrates his use of “Embedded evaluators, behavioural insight specialists and decision scientists ensuring constant improvement”. Similarly, in the aftermath of LTITE, he says, “We’ve learned how to deploy behavioural insights from scientists to improve our major campaigns”.
Read More: Who Was Responsible for the “Look Them in the Eyes” Campaign?