Publicis Sapient · USC Shoah Foundation
18 Signature Moves. 60,000 Voices
Capabilities
- Vision & Strategy
- Creative Direction
- Team Leadership
- Audience Research
- Visual Storytelling
The largest archive of its kind, and still too few people knew it existed
The USC Shoah Foundation holds nearly 60,000 testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. The problem was reach: too few people knew it was there, and fewer still engaged with it in any way that mattered. Only ten percent of the archive was publicly accessible. The rest lived behind institutional walls, available to researchers who already knew to look.
I was brought in as Creative Director to answer a hard question: how do you bring an archive this powerful to audiences as different as a grandmother tracing her family history and a policymaker trying to prevent the next genocide?
Before hatred had time to take hold
Testimony doesn’t just preserve history. It changes the people who encounter it. That was the Foundation’s core belief, and it was the right one. But belief without reach is just intention. Sixty thousand testimonies existed. Most of the world would never encounter a single one.
The strategic question wasn’t how to get more people to the archive. It was how to get the right testimony to the right person at a moment when it could actually move them. And those people were not one audience. They ranged from a grandmother tracing her family history to a policymaker trying to prevent the next genocide. At its most ambitious, that meant getting testimony to someone in an active conflict zone before hatred had time to take hold.
Audience Identification & Journey Mapping
Eighteen means life
Eighteen Signature Moves was what we brought to the board. Eighteen wasn’t arbitrary. In Hebrew it means life, and for an archive built so that voices are never forgotten, that felt right.
The ideas ranged from immersive genocide experiences in 360 video to geo-targeted campaigns reaching people in active conflict zones. From augmented reality pilgrimages to physical sites referenced in testimonies, to a global social network connecting genocide prevention centers around the world. The scale and ambition of the vision was what earned the invitation to present to the Institute’s global board of directors.
The engagement didn’t stop there. Brand exploration, design, a comprehensive vision that became the foundation for a much larger pitch. I still stay in touch with the executive director. For work rooted in something this important, that continuity means something.
