Warlingo wages war on ‘Ukraine fatigue’

At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this year, delegates were joined virtually by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who urged the creative community to help keep the conversations around the war in Ukraine alive.

Galvanised into action, RXM Creative collaborated with five selected charities – Razom, National Bank of Ukraine Armed Forces, Come Back Alive, United 24 and Nova Ukraine – on an innovative project. 

The team noticed that, in daily work emails and conversations, the marketing industry uses warlike terms such as, target, execution, tactics, engagement, guerilla, killer campaign. These terms have become so normalised, it’s easy to forget their meaning in a military context and with the press moving on from frequent reporting the brutal realities of the ongoing war can be forgotten.

The idea for Warlingo.org was born. The search engine enables a website owner to type in their URL whereupon the proprietary technology detects how many war terms the site is using, then suggests donating an equivalent amount to a suggested charity organisation.

Oleksii Novikov, Creative Director, Come Back Alive Foundation said: “We love this approach to ‘Ukraine fatigue’. This case is a powerful example of dealing with ugly truths and thinking in advance."