Marching over the Horizon
When reviewing the selection of work from the Cannes 2018 Ad Festival there was one advert that stood out to me: ‘Price on our lives,’ an advert about the March for Our Lives demonstrations, a student-led movement aimed at lobbying politicians to enact greater control legislation in America.
Not only did this advert relate to me as someone who has a keen interest in politics, but it was especially moving, impactful and incredibly inspiring. The word ‘limitless’ describes the ambition of the students leading this movement, many of whom are of a similar age to me. They haven’t been deterred by the continued lack of progress regarding gun control legislation in the past. They haven’t been any less ambitious in their aims and where they want to take this movement. Instead, they have set their sights high and believed that they can achieve what many people view as an unimaginable goal.
They managed to bring millions of Americans and people worldwide together to try and enact change through the March for Our Lives demonstrations on 24th March 2018, and have also used technology such as QR codes on t-shirts that, when scanned, register voters for upcoming elections – an idea particularly aimed at the youth who have notoriously low turnout in elections.
March for Our Lives is pushing the boundaries of what is politically possible in order to address very real problems and there is so much that we can take from it. The creativity and innovation in their methods has given greater impetus to a movement that appears more and more likely to achieve, even at least partially, its once-unimaginable goal.
So, what can we learn from the March for Our Lives movement? Well, one take away is that even issues that seem impossible to tackle can be addressed with ambition, innovation and creative thinking.
Written by Sasha Batchelor, Work Experience Student at Now.