UNFAIR CITY was born out of a need to find new ways of highlighting Dublin’s homelessness crisis and the growing inequality in our city. Homelessness has been getting steadily worse every year and the public are becoming desensitised to stories about it. It has become easy for people to ignore it and difficult for the media to cover it. For this reason Dublin Simon deliberately used one of the most contentious areas of technology, Artificial Intelligence, to create a groundbreaking film to act as a trojan horse to get the media and public to engage with the homelessness crisis again.

The film had an immediate positive impact for Dublin Simon. For a local charity with no media spend, it reached far beyond our intended Dublin audience – with 25.4 million impressions*, in a city with a population of just 1.2 million.

Within hours of launch it featured on RTÉ (the national broadcaster), The Irish Independent (the highest circulation newspaper in the country) and Newstalk (the largest independent national radio station), as well as dozens of other national and international publishers, radio stations, newspapers and blogs.

However, more importantly, that reach was matched with donations, with an 259% increase during the month of the campaign – 55% of whom were new donors aged 18-34, helping with our goal of expanding the declining donor base**.

Finally, much of the editorial comment centred on the enormous potential of AI for the charity sector as a tool to allow vulnerable or marginalised people to tell their stories. One of the difficulties of telling stories of homelessness is that it can be very exposing for Dublin Simon’s service users. Reliving difficult moments in their lives in front of cameras and crew can be traumatic. The great benefit of using AI in this instance is that it allowed Justin to tell his story, on his own terms, in a way that was still visually engaging and evocative. In this sense the use of AI helped to maintain the dignity and humanity of his story.

*Source: Dublin Simon Internal.

**Source: Coveragebook and Similarweb Reports, 4/4/23.

When you are homeless that is not all you are. Yet, that is how people are defined and understood and spoken about. The truth is, reducing their humanity to this one word compounded the brutal nature of the life they were living. It further lessened them, diminished them. So, for the first time, Dublin Simon made a campaign that speaks directly to homeless people, rather than about them. It is both an apology and a hymn to their humanity and the richness of their lives. They deserve nothing less.

AWARDS:

ICAD 2022:

SILVER – Web film up to 60 seconds

SILVER – VOD / VOL single

SHARK AWARDS 2022

BRONZE – Best Direction

Executive Creative Director – Shane O’Brien

Copywriter – Des Kavanagh

Art Director – Rob Murray

Agency Producer – Georgia Stevenson

Directed by Dermot Malone for Banjoman Films.