What happened when Leo Burnett Chicago forced an NRA rep to face the consequences of gun violence

The National Rifle Association (NRA) spends $250 million annually to advocate for pro-gun legislation in the United States. So how do you begin fighting for common sense gun laws in the face of such a powerful Goliath? Leo Burnett Chicago faced this dilemma when Change The Ref, a gun safety campaigning organisation, tasked them with staging an intervention designed to pressure the United States Congress into passing universal background checks on all gun sales into law. The agency came up with the idea of appropriating the very same confrontational tactics used by the NRA to maintain its power and influence over lawmakers in the United States. Creatives at Leo Burnett Chicago leveraged a sobering visual image of lost potential as well as lost lives by staging a graduation ceremony for ‘The Lost Class’ – the 3,044 students who would have graduated in 2021 if they hadn’t been killed by a gun – and inviting two well-known gun advocates to give the commencement address.. The intervention and accompanying film The Lost Class was awarded an impressive 12 Pencils, including two coveted Black Pencils. We spoke to Leo Burnett’s Executive Creative Director Sam Shepherd and Head of Production Ashley Geisheker to find out how their team pulled it off.

The creative team believed that showing the devastating effects of gun violence in a stark way was essential if the intervention was going to have a genuine lasting impact. They landed on the idea of visualising lost potential, and the future robbed from so many students murdered by guns – in as unflinching a way as possible. “That’s what the graduation chairs represented to us,” explains Sam Shepherd, Executive Creative Director at Leo Burnett. “Arlington National Cemetery and the way the tombstones are arranged played a major role in our idea.” As such, 3,044 empty white folding graduation chairs were spaced individually across a soundstage in Las Vegas, Nevada, emphasising each lost life while echoing the seemingly endless view of white gravestones on green lawn at the national memorial site in Virginia. The simplicity of the idea meant that viewed from any angle, the mass of graduation chairs turned each gun fatality statistic into a real person, with friends, relatives and communities still living with the consequences of their deaths.

Pro-gun advocates David Keene and John Lott were each invited to give commencement addresses at what they believed was a ceremony rehearsal for the James Madison Academy graduating class of 2021. But James Madison Academy is in fact a fictional school. While the graduation chairs appeared ordinary and unassuming to the gun advocates speaking from the stage, in the film they’re juxtaposed with recordings of 911 calls from students in the midst of school shootings. “It was a delicate balance to make sure the NRA was faced with the consequences of its actions, while highlighting the terrible loss of life,” says Ashley Geisheker, Executive Producer and Head of Production at Leo Burnett. The team wanted the end takeaway to respectfully honour and represent the 3,044 students who should be graduating. 

However, that visual representation was only effective if it was placed in front of those responsible, the NRA, explains Shepherd. “That part of the idea required a totally different approach; bravery, aggressive confrontation, and using the NRA’s own deceitful tactics against them at all cost.” How did they navigate the ethics of tricking and effectively publicly humiliating Lott and Keene? “Gun safety activism has been fighting too fair and playing too nice,” says Shepherd. Geisheker echoes this: “Two individuals may have experienced some minor embarrassment for not doing their own background checks. That pales in comparison to children being murdered by guns, as a result of the actions taken by these men and the NRA.”

“We wanted to break into the national gun violence news cycle, without needing another shooting to do it,” explains Shepherd. Geisheker hoped to energise the next generation of voters to go to the polls especially because trying to make changes in small, personal ways (such as donating, sharing links online) can feel like “screaming into the wind.” It’s why she believes that “using our collective skill sets and relationships with each other is just one other meaningful thing we can do as an industry, to try and change the tide.”

Both Shepherd and Geisheker believe it’s more important than ever that campaigns like The Lost Class make a genuine impact, rather than simply being for show. “That’s why setting clear intentions and goals at the beginning of a project matters,” says Shepherd. For Geisheker, keeping the students at the forefront of every decision they made was also essential. Looking back on the project, Shepherd believes CNN dedicating 30 minute of its news cycle to The Lost Class showed its impact. “Having the film shared on the floor of the House Judiciary Committee on Gun Violence was another direct impact. But unfortunately, it’s not enough. The only real impact that matters is major progress in gun safety legislation and we cannot stop until that’s achieved.”