What are they doing back home?

A charity campaign created last year for The Haven Night Shelter in Cape Town, South Africa, was instrumental in bringing the hardships of the homeless people in the city out into the open. Haven Night Shelters are situated all over the Cape Peninsula and do fantastic work not only getting people off the streets, but also in trying to get kids who have run away from home reunited with their families. The essence of the campaign is in highlighting the extreme differences between the have and have-nots of South Africa using media, which would normally be noticed by people looking for new homes.

The ads, which were placed all over Cape Town, were made to look as if they had been placed by estate agents advertising various properties. Headlines included “Sensational City Living” and “Location! Location! Location!” typical of normal property ads. The only difference was that the visuals did not match the regular lingo used by estate agents. Instead of showing multi-million rand houses, the images are of benches, bush shelters and the underneath of bridges. Press ads ran in newspaper property sections, flyers were dropped into peoples’ post boxes and “On Show” signs were placed at similar locations to the ones shown in the press ads and flyers.

A clever and unique way of bringing a needy cause out into the limelight.

Michael-John Van Vuuren