Hispanic marketing and advertising agency MARCA Miami is helping bring attention to today’s National Human Trafficking Day with a new commercial that it created for the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking (FCAHT).
The new video, dubbed “Makeover”, was produced with the hope that it would raise further awareness and increase knowledge of the signs and symptoms of Human Trafficking. The video can be found on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxsuLGKi4rs
Some key facts about human trafficking include:
– Every minute somewhere in the world, a human being is bought, sold or forced into slavery.
– Between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked each year. Most people are not aware that this is a problem in the United States. But it is: between 14,500 and 17,500 human beings are trafficked into the United States every year.
– Of the the number of people who are trafficked, half are children.
Most Floridians do not know that their state is a hub for Human Trafficking and that it records some of the highest incidences in the country of this type of criminal activity, which involves the commercial exchange and exploitation of humans including forced prostitution and pornography, involuntary labor and debt bondage.
MARCA’s historic support of FCAHT has included television spots, print and digital ad campaigns and web videos to help raise awareness and combat this serious problem.
A previous video created by MARCA for the FCAHT, “Auction,” was noted for its powerful juxtaposition of a song describing a slave auction in the pre-Civil War South with images of modern human beings, and was awarded a silver medal at the 8th Annual London International Awards last month as well as a shortlist at the Cannes Advertising Festival. It can be seen on the home page of the organization’s website at http://www.stophumantrafficking.org.
“We wanted to continue the campaign started last year with the web video “Auction” were we used strong license music to help gain awareness,” said Armando Hernandez, Chief Creative Officer at MARCA. “People need to know what sometimes happens right under their noses.”
Anna Rodriguez of the FCAHT agrees. “Public awareness is one of our best weapons in this fight, and videos like MARCA’s can be particularly useful,” she stated.