Situation:

Yekaterinburg is the fourth largest city in Russia by population; and one of the very last in terms of quality of roads. The local site ura.ru, which writes about life in the city, decided to remind politicians that it is their duty to repair the roads.

Our politicians don’t care about potholes. Their only worry is their own public image. So we associated road holes with the images of certain politicians. In the night, on three potholes in the city centre, we drew the faces of the governor, the mayor and the vice-mayor. In the following day workers were sent to the holes but only to cover the portraits with paint. The officials were not aware that we were watching over the holes with hidden cameras. We came back to the holes and next to each of the painted-out portraits we wrote: 'Painting it is not fixing it'.

The news about caricatures with the reference to ura.ru became a sensation in Russia. The politicians were no longer able to sit idle. The holes were fixed. Thus a special-purpose project Ura.ru Roads was launched, where every citizen can submit a problem road with a demand to fix it. The news about the action was released in more than 300 media, mentioned in social networks more than 7,000 times. During this period of this episode, the website traffic on ura.ru doubled. During the month before the action 1.4 km of road were repaired, during the month after – 7.6 km.

The activation dedicated to a problem was embedded in the problem itself - main roads' potholes. The first source of the news was advertised on the site Ura.ru, so every media that wanted to publish the news about potholes used a link to Ura.ru, increasing number of visitors and brand knowledge.