L’Oréal Paris Canada and anti-harassment non-profit Right To Be have paired for a new campaign to support the Canadian launch of a global initiative that directly targets a major issue for women: street harassment.

Called “Stand Up,” the initiative aims to increase awareness of the issue and encourage more people to intervene. This is driven by data and insights that show that in Canada, even though 57% of women and 40% of men identify as feminists, only 6% of women harassed on the street have had the assistance of someone else intervening on their behalf.

“As the world’s number one beauty brand, it is our responsibility to continue to stand up against street harassment in Canada,” explains Edouard Hottebart, general manager for L’Oréal Paris Canada. “We knew it was the right way to combat the problem by making it incumbent on all of us – not just the immediate victim – to fight against street harassment anytime and everywhere we see it.”

The initiative addresses the issue by encouraging people to take free digital training – offered in both official languages – to help them identify and step in to prevent street harassment. In support of “Stand Up,” L’Oreal and Right to Be have partnered with McCann Montreal on a campaign designed to generate moral outrage and raise awareness of the initiative.

It is doing so primarily through high-profile OOH – specifically, posters placed in high-traffic areas across the country.

The posters contain “purposefully provocative” messages that echo victim-blaming rhetoric (specifically, that victims of street harassment are “asking for it”) as well as a sentence goading readers to rip down the poster if they disagree, according to Dave Roberts, ECD at McCann Montreal. When the posters are torn down, they reveal new ones beneath that encourage those who interact to stand up against street harassment by following a QR code directly to the initiative’s microsite and the aforementioned digital training.

The goal is to encourage those who are outraged to “divert their anger into being part of the solution,” Roberts adds.

More than 1.5 million people have taken the training globally, according to the initiative’s data, and the goal of this new campaign is “to drive half a million Canadians to take the 10-minute training and learn how to stand up against street harassment safely,” says Hottebart, adding that this is “only the beginning of our accelerated efforts for the program in Canada for 2023.”

In addition to the OOH, the national campaign is supported on digital and social. It will be running for four weeks.