HanVoice invites Canadians to step into a North Korean living room.
How do you make Canadians feel ownership over an issue they’re unfamiliar with?
This is the ask that HanVoice, a Canadian non-profit organization working to improve human rights for North Koreans, approached ARENA with. HanVoice was struggling to raise awareness for their cause, and needed a creative campaign to get eyeballs on the issue.
They gave ARENA full reign to pitch ideas across all media types.
Where we ended up taking this ask was completely unexpected, but incredibly successful.
HanVoice and ARENA invited Canadians to step into a North Korean living room layered with educational stories of escapees, information smuggling, and harsh government tactics.
In the summer of 2022, HanVoice opened The People’s Museum of North Korea: a month-long exhibition at stackt Market in the heart of Toronto, showcasing a traditional North Korean home with hidden insights discoverable through an interactive QR-linked web experience.
ARENA’s strategy for the campaign – which stretched across digital advertising, Out-of-Home placements, and experiential marketing – centered around the resilience of the North Korean people adapting to their situation. From gray market entrepreneurs, to curious civilians, despite harsh government regulations more and more North Koreans are interested in learning about the world outside their home nation.
This was key to the narrative of ARENA’s campaign, which was grounded in HanVoice’s goal to raise awareness about the organization’s refugee resettlement program, while dismantling old stigmas about the DPRK and shifting the focus away from the regime to its people.
The museum educated visitors not only about the country’s modernity, but also how Canadians can help North Korean refugees directly through the historic resettlement program by HanVoice — in 2021, Canada opened a new pathway for North Korean refugees as one of only three global pathways.
Online, the campaign gained over 2,500,000 impressions across all media types with the help of New York-based influencer and best-selling author The Korean Vegan and numerous content creators on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
Local news outlets, including CBC, CTV, Toronto Life, City News and more picked up the story, and international outlets including The Korea Times, rfa, and Hypebeast took The People’s Museum to an international audience.
ARENA grew HanVoice’s social media reach from 70 accounts per month to just over 80,000 accounts in three weeks on a barebones media budget, helping raise $230,000 from both grassroots and corporate donations.
The exhibit drove over 3,500 visitors, $20,000 in in-person funds raised, and over 2,000 email sign-ups.
A welcome addition to the success of the campaign was the recent Applied Arts Advertising Award for the People's Museum of North Korea.
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