Gun violence kills 40,000 people in the US every year. That’s thousands of lost votes that could help elect gun-sense politicians, yet in the previous election some states were decided by as few at 10,000 votes. So, how could we get people to help replace those lost votes?

We needed sympathetic but unregistered voters to register to vote. And unmotivated registered voters to actually go do it. Telling them the facts wasn't going to do it. They've heard the statistics about the importance of voting countless times. Instead, we needed to use emotion to get them up and out.

So we created a tactic that generated its own media. We brought back one of the victims of a horrific school shooting to serve as a voice nobody could ignore.

Gun violence kills 40,000 people in the US every year. That’s thousands of lost votes that could help elect gun-sense politicians.

In 2018, Joaquin Oliver was killed in a horrific mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. The 2020 election would have been the first year he could have voted. Working with his parents and revolutionary AI technology, we brought Joaquin back to life digitally to deliver a message to all those who weren’t registered- or even just likely- to vote.

We released online film over our client's owned channels of Joaquin pleading for those viewers to vote on his behalf because he can’t vote for himself. It drove viewers to unfinishedvotes.com, where people could register to replace his vote and those of other gun violence victims.

We knew that 40,000 people are killed by guns in the US each year. We also knew that those people- and their loved ones- would be the most likely to be motivated by the single issue of gun safety. And that just replacing a fraction of these lost votes could shift the dynamic in a vital election, especially since some states had been decided by as few as 10,000 votes in the previous Presidential election.

By leveraging our gun safety client's owned channels (and their allies in the community), we were able to reach our core target- friends and family of people affected by gun violence. Of course, that also reached the opposition, who served to amplify our message further.

And that message was delivered in the most hard hitting way possible- by Joaquin and his parents asking people to vote for him, because he couldn't.

The film was released over Change the Ref's owned channels: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in time to urge US voters to register to vote in the 2020 US Presidential Election. But it quickly spread, earning coverage across media around the world, not to mention countless of social media mentions.

The goal was to be as authentic as possible. It had to look and feel like Joaquin. We pulled no punches.

Traditionally, deep fakes are created by training an AI what a figure looks like from every angle, every light, making every expression. That’s why most deep fakes feature famous people.

Tragically, there weren’t enough images of Joaquin to train the AI. Instead, an entirely new technique had to be created. Our AI was trained what faces and expressions were with thousands of random faces. Then, it was given access to our limited library of images of Joaquin and had to extrapolate, much like a human artist would.

The results were powerful. Not only did we create an emotional call to action for gun safety advocates. We also created a powerful new technique to bring back victim’s voices.

Over 2.4 million views in 24 hours of launch.

Global broadcast news coverage.

#1 trending topic on Fox News.

And over 1,290 pro gun-sense politicians elected in 2020.

We even received a personal message from President Joe Biden.

Most importantly, on the 3rd anniversary of the Parkland Shooting, President Biden announced in Congress that he is demanding commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on American streets.