Don’t Mind Your Own Business
Giving New Yorkers permission to not mind their own business
The brief
Use the World Cup's scale to raise awareness of human trafficking and help people recognize and respond to the signs.
The reframe
The barrier comes before awareness. In New York and New Jersey, minding your own business is a social norm, so the work had to interrupt the instinct to look away.
My role
Senior Strategist, Prosek Partners
I developed the creative strategy, Don't Mind Your Own Business, for HMH's FIFA World Cup sponsorship.
Figures
- 1.2M+
- From: See something, say somethingTo: Don't mind your own business
- From: Teach people the signsTo: Interrupt the instinct not to look
- From: Raise awarenessTo: Give that attention somewhere to go
The full case
- Hackensack Meridian Health came to us as the official hospital of the NY/NJ World Cup Host Committee with a high-stakes awareness challenge. More than 1.2 million visitors were expected in the region, and officials anticipated increased human trafficking risk around the tournament. HMH wanted to use the scale and visibility of the World Cup to raise awareness and help people recognize and respond to the signs.
- We’re taught to mind our own business. It works broadly, including in the suburbs, but it felt particularly native to New York and New Jersey — navigating packed trains, crowded sidewalks, airports, hotels, and major events teaches you to filter out a tremendous amount of what’s happening around you. In a region where there’s always something happening, minding your own business becomes a social norm. Human trafficking creates a reason to challenge that norm: it happens in the same everyday environments where we’re conditioned to keep moving and leave other people alone.
- Instead of competing in the crowded “stay alert” space — one more voice telling people to watch what’s happening around them — we went upstream to the behavioral barrier that comes before awareness itself. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t know the signs; it was that they’d been trained not to look. So rather than asking people to “see something, say something,” we set out to interrupt the instinct that comes before seeing anything at all.
- We knew from the start we needed to go beyond another “see something, say something” campaign — especially in New York and New Jersey, where people are already surrounded by messages telling them to stay alert, and where that competes with the deeply ingrained instinct to keep your head down, don’t stare, don’t get involved. That tension led to the question that unlocked everything: what if, in this instance, minding someone else’s business could help save their life?
- That thinking became “Don’t Mind Your Own Business.” We took something people are normally told not to do — stare — and turned it into the action we wanted them to take. The campaign then gave people somewhere to go with that attention: QR codes, hotline information, and educational resources, alongside training tools for law enforcement, hospitals, and hospitality workers, running across high-volume transit areas, stadiums, and parks.