Who Was Responsible for the “Look Them in the Eyes” Campaign?
We all remember the harrowing “Look them in the eyes” (LTITE) messaging campaign of early 2021, aimed at levering compliance with Covid restrictions. By means of a series of videos and posters, we were confronted with close-up images of acutely unwell patients in intensive care units, ominous music and a voiceover beseeching us to tell them, nose-to-nose, that we never break the rules. Deploying materials that were heavily infused with behavioural science strategies (‘nudges’), frightening and shaming an already overly scared population into obedience, this advertising initiative was widely considered to be the most controversial – and unethical – of all the public health communications during the Covid event. But who were the key actors responsible for inflicting the LTITE campaign on the populace?
My recently published research has revealed the identities of those culpable for arguably the most emotionally disturbing assault by state-funded public health technocrats upon the British people. By scrutinising the documented outputs of potentially key actors (politicians, civil servants, advisory groups, advertising executives and prominent behavioural scientists), together with over 40 original Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to Government departments, four players centrally involved in the production of LTITE have been identified.
MullenLowe advertising agency
On January 21st 2021, the Government announced the introduction of the new LTITE Covid communications campaign, describing how it represented a shift in tone from previous pandemic messaging towards “encouraging people to take personal responsibility and consider the impact of their behaviour on others”. The same YouGov document also identified MullenLowe as the advertising agency commissioned to create the LTITE videos and posters. The contractual arrangement was a lucrative one, MullenLowe receiving £16 million of taxpayers money in 2020 and a further £40 million for the year August 2021 to August 2022. In keeping with these extraordinarily high payments, Tom Knox (executive partner at MullenLowe and longest serving member of their Covid response team) stated that the pandemic constituted the “biggest U.K. advertising campaign since the Second World War”.
The MullenLowe website provides further details of the advertising agency’s prominent role in the genesis of the LTITE project. Based on its own commissioned research that had suggested 20% of the population underestimated the risk of COVID-19, it strove to “make the risk real for those who were unsure or didn’t believe it” by focusing on the people who had “experienced the very worst of the pandemic”. Following the imposition of the second lockdown in January 2021, MullenLowe’s overarching goal was to get people to stay at home.
And it is clear that the creators of these harrowing videos and posters are immensely proud of their work. Citing HM Government’s astrological computer-modelling predictions as the information source, they claim that “‘Look them in the eyes’ was a critical part of the COVID-19 campaign, which is estimated to have prevented between 1.5-1.8 million infections between April-December 2020, saving between 22,629-27,658 lives”. Clearly, MullenLowe – in its self-congratulatory myopia – failed to consider the extensive fear-related collateral death toll in their appraisal (for example, consequent to people being too scared to attend hospital with other illnesses, and elderly people being abandoned to die prematurely of loneliness and neglect). Furthermore, given that their campaign was not launched until January 2021, the time span of the HM Government’s speculative figures renders the LTITE initiative irrelevant.
Conrad Bird – senior civil servant
Conrad Bird is Director of Campaigns and Marketing at the Cabinet Office, and – by his own admission – was centrally involved in the development of nudge-infused messaging during Covid. In November 2020, prior to the LTITE campaign, Bird celebrates his use of “Embedded evaluators, behavioural insight specialists and decision scientists ensuring constant improvement”. Similarly, in the aftermath of LTITE, he says, “We’ve learned how to deploy behavioural insights from scientists to improve our major campaigns”.
When asked in August 2023 (via a personal email) about his role in the development of the videos and posters used in the LTITE project, Bird replied:
Regarding a specific creative brief, this would have been given orally by my team in response to Government and scientific advice concerning the rise of the Covid Delta [Alpha?] variant. As our advertising agency, MullenLowe will have worked on a number of creative routes in response to the challenge, which would then have been researched in focus groups for their potential effectiveness. The most promising route (Look me in the Eyes) would then have been developed further and signed off by colleagues from Health, the Chief Medical Officer and responsible Ministers.
An August 2023 FOI request confirmed that Bird led the commissioning team responsible for the LTITE campaign.
Cabinet Office Behavioural Science Team
Perhaps surprisingly, my research revealed that the direct behavioural science advice to Conrad Bird and his team came neither from SPI-B (the SAGE subgroup dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of the messaging campaign) nor the much-talked-about Behavioural Insight Team (aka the ‘Nudge Unit’). Instead, a less visible group of nudgers secreted in the Cabinet Office are implicated as the proximal source of guidance for the civil servants involved in LTITE.
There are up to five behavioural scientists located in the Cabinet Office. (Based on the FOI Act, the authorities are permitted to withhold the exact number when it is no more than five.) And the Government confirmed that this small in-house team “provided insight and guidance to Conrad Bird”. Therefore one can conclude that, while the outputs of the SPI-B and the Nudge Unit during Covid often endorsed the use of ethically dubious nudges (see here), and could plausibly have indirectly influenced the various actors involved in the LTITE campaign, the sanctioned source of behavioural science input was the Cabinet Office team.
Matt Hancock – Minister for Health and Social Care
The most predictable finding of all. It will surprise no one that the same Minister who warned youngsters, “Don’t kill your gran“, and who wished to “frighten the pants off” people with a new variant, was also ultimately responsible for sanctioning the LTITE campaign. As confirmed by a 2023 FOI response, Matt Hancock (the then-Health Secretary) was the individual who conducted the ‘sign off’ (as referenced in the Conrad Bird statement above).
While this research initiative has identified four key players involved in the development and dissemination of the harrowing LTITE videos and posters, some questions remain unanswered. For instance, the MullenLowe advertising agency will probably employ its own behavioural scientists and it is unclear how much creative autonomy it was granted – the company did not respond to our requests for information about this issue. However, by identifying the main actors responsible for a contentious campaign that strategically scared and shamed an already frightened population, my research provides pointers as to where we might look to expose those culpable for future nudge-infused state propaganda drives, whether they be under the banner of public health, climate or another purported ‘global crisis’.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign opposed to mask mandates.
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It was clear from their intitial statements that they had examined the intelligence coming out of China and had concluded that such a disease didn’t warrant extreme measures. And then as Ferguson said, they got away with it in Italy and they realised they could do the same here. The point is that it was insincere from the beginning and their actions clearly tracked an unspoken agenda.
Didn’t some of the photos of bodies, in body bags in Italy, come from a few years earlier from people who drowned crossing the sea. If true it would add to the growing list that shows that 2020 was not a public health crisis, it was a Great Reset foisted on an unaware public.
Yes from Lampedusa. Let’s not forget the paid actors to fill the body bags, with many unzipping the bag to have a smoke or get some air….you know ‘pandemic’.
The situation in Italy always seemed weird…chaotic scenes in hospitals, everybody in full anti-microbial gear but no bodies in the street.
Black death killed around 35% – 50% of the population. Now that WAS a catastrophic plague…certainly for the upper classes who then had to pay what was left of the population a decent wage to get stuff done.
Government has no business having a role called “Director of Campaigns and Marketing at the Cabinet Office”. What does he do when he is not brain washing the public over Covid.
Well, he’s thinking up ways of brainwashing them in some other way of course.
Probably moonlighting designing torture techniques for dodgy governments (which is all of them, really) during extraordinary rendition.
I still get ‘Nam flashbacks’ whenever I pass a local bus garage near my biggest supermarket. Early that year, every bus was emblazoned with the full scale : “Act like you have the virus”, “Look them in the Eye” etc.
I was apoplectic with rage every time I walked past – we paid for that bullshit fear porn, and obviously the people behind the scary eyes and masks were paid actors. Someone needs to be answerable – I’d like to see heads on sticks!
That was the third lockdown…
And I believe, it was not supposed to be the last!
Michie the Bitchie maybe 🤔
One advantage about not having a TV is, until I read this article this morning, I literally did not have any idea there was any more to this marketing campaign than just those irritating posters at bus stops.
Whitty was in it, up to his neck!
I still think Valance had more skin in the BigPharma game than Whitty. I trusted him less that Whitty, who seemed more sincere in his beliefs. Not that I am in any way condoning what they all did to us during the wretched lockdowns.
When I think of how much money this government wasted on fearmongering advertising during the plandemic I could cry. People who could have been saved if seen early and treated with repurposed drugs and then antibiotics for any secondary bacterial lung infection. ProfessorJohn Ioannidis, Stanford, told the world exactly what the INFECTION FATALITY RATES were for all age groups. The “experts” in the UK chose to ignore his research. Many died! Just think of the money that could have been saved.
These people have no business being anywhere near Government. They are evil.
These people all took our money, that’s our money, leaving us a paltry residue to pay our fuel bills which some of these same people have hiked to meet their other doomsday obession of “climate change”, which they then tax us on, our food bills which have increased as a result which again they tax us on, all, all to satisfy their need to control through the means of fear and terror. My suspicion is that Conrad Bird will be on a salary and package that is worth in excess of 200k, and a gold plated Pension on which he can probably retire in luxury pre the age of 60, alonmg with Hancock and the other monsters. As for the Ad agency they are no different from Jud Suss who produced the posters for the 1930’s German regime. This Ad agency would probably say they were just doing their job at the governments request, but somewhere they crossed a line where money became more important than humanity, and for that they have made themselves complicit in the ruination of people’s lives that we are seeing today. I am no longer in Corporate life but if I were I would not… Read more »
It’s really annoying that we little people are not in a position to boycott them.
It was Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) who employed his uncle’s psychological insights on mass behaviour to advise the US government on the key issue of getting the reluctant American populace to join the join the first world war effort. His success was in managing to devise a way in employing mass persuasion ‘propaganda’ to achieve this. He said that it occurred to him afterwards that if propaganda worked in wartime, it would work in peacetime. Knowing that he couldn’t use the word ‘propaganda’ for his methodology he coined a new description for this peacetime propaganda. He invented a new conveniently innocuous description…….Public Relations’.
I regarded the LTITE campaign with total disdain. However, I loved the counter-offensive memes that were put out, ridiculing it. I had some great ones saved on my phone but can’t find them now.
Found some.
Official statistics’ offices have roughly 90% of mortality data within 2 or 3 weeks. In other words, by 21st January 2021, when the LTITE campaign started, the ONS had practically all their data for 2020. It is easy to access data from government statistics’ offices and plot the number of deaths over a year. In northern latitude countries, the maximum number of deaths always occurs in the winter months – never in April! The attachment shows a comparison of such data from the ONS and the German equivalent (Statistisches Bundesamt) which I made at the end of 2021. The black lines are the data for 2020. Note the enormous difference in the number of deaths between UK and Germany in the April/May timeframe. Note also that the bad flu of 2018 (red line) resulted in far more deaths in Germany than the supposed corona epidemic. Indeed, the slight flat peak at the end of March 2020 in Germany is statistically not really relevant, especially if also taking the annual rise of population into account. So, if country leaders had communicated with each other, they would clearly have recognized there was no fatal disease spreading worldwide. (Similar analyses I made show that France, Italy, Spain… Read more »
If only we could ‘LOOK THEM IN THE EYES’ – every single one of those responsible for the fear ‘n’ guilt-trip tactics – through the bars of a prison cell, and inform them that they are low-life sewage scum.
But there is one upside to all this: never ever again will I and, I hope, millions of other people pay the slightest attention to the trite slogans that these hacks dredge up from their diseased minds to nudge, manipulate and trick the taxpayers who pay their obscenely inflated salaries.
‘The Establishment’ proved itself to be incompetent, untrustworthy, malevolent coercive controllers with no respect for our basic human rights or dignity as free citizens.
‘As you sow, so shall you reap’.