The Canadian Centre for Child Protection asked us to raise awareness of the rising global child pornography epidemic. The challenges were threefold:

Sensitivity of subject matter: For this to be successful, it needed to have high impact and convey the serious nature of the problem, while at the same time be sensitive to the delicate subject matter. We needed to reach Canadians in a disruptive way.

Perception of the global problem: Most Canadians don’t realize that child pornography isn’t just an issue in faraway countries, but also in Canada. We had to challenge the perception that this problem doesn’t exist at home - a country widely perceived as safe and progressive.

Finite financial resources: Being an NFP organization, we worked with extremely limited funds. That required us to get efficient, innovative, and leverage like-minded partners to execute with scaled back resources. With a lack of media dollars, our impressions had to be earned.

Given the sensitivity and deplorable nature of the subject matter, creating a way to communicate the impact and horror of child pornography was a unique and difficult challenge.

In our research, we discovered that the term “lolli” is used as online code by child sex offenders to reference and denigrate their victims. Lollipop became our proxy for victims of child sexual assault, better known as child pornography. The reality that predators use the term to discuss victims, coupled with a lollipop’s inherent association with childhood innocence, made lollipops the perfect way to visually represent the issue.

Capitalizing on the trend of fun and carefree Instagrammable pop-ups, we created a high impact visual installation designed to draw consumers into the experience, then confront them with the realities of this problem. Our initiative was titled Lolli: The Exhibit No One Wants To Talk About.

We lined the interior of an industrial container-sized room at Stackt Market in Toronto with 10,824 lollipops: one representing each new image of child pornography detected online every 12 hours.

Visitors were drawn to Lolli’s vibrant and fun looking exterior, intrigued by why it might be something people don’t want to talk about. Inside, they were confronted with the size and scale of the problem, with staggering statistics on the walls, verbatim quotes found from offenders on the dark web, and audio recordings from actual survivors detailing their pain, shame, and optimism for a solution.

The installation’s “wall of hope” at the exit showcased the Canadian Centre for Child Protection’s tools and programs and tireless fight for change. From here, consumers shared their experience to invite others to join the fight.

Over the course of three days, 1,200 Canadians visited Lolli, including Toronto Mayor, John Tory. National news outlets such as the CBC and Global News shot live-to-air segments and photo shoots inside Lolli, and Canadian Press shot stills, which sparked further conversation.

To date, Lolli has achieved over 3,500,000 social and 100,000,000+ earned media impressions.