Sex work is work. Sex workers have rights.
The Office of Industrial Relations, in partnership with WorkSafe Queensland, is responsible for regulating workplace health and safety across the state. With the decriminalisation of sex work, new legislation had come into effect that needed to be communicated to the industry, particularly to sex workers themselves. With New Word Order’s well-honed expertise in behaviour change and informational communications, our agency was perfectly placed to create a suite of assets that worked to protect some of the most vulnerable workers in Queensland.
Challenge
A key challenge of this project was the requirement to communicate with a host of different industry players and all kinds of sex workers, ranging from brothel workers to massage parlours to private escort services and more. Each operates differently, but our messaging had to be appropriate for all. Another challenge was the level of language and literacy skills of many sex workers. Research showed that English is a second language for many sex workers, and therefore many have below-average language and literacy skills. A final challenge was the need to not stereotype sex workers through certain perceived visual biases. For a video-based campaign, this was a particularly complex challenge.
The spark
One early strategic decision was to break the informational content up into more palatable morsels. This allowed us to concentrate on singular messages rather than cramming everything together.
Our primary strategic guidance was all about the audience. We resolved to understand as much as we could about how sex work operates and how the new legislation could improve their workplaces. Our client looped us in on a project working group which included a sex worker representative. Their knowledge and advice was invaluable to our strategic and creative approach.
Creative
Producing five informational videos is a big task, but one that our creative team cherished. We made an important decision to do the videos as animations rather than live action. We felt strongly that the nature of the content lent itself more naturally to an animation approach, but it was critical that we developed the right kind of animation style and look. We needed it to be different and engaging, but still provide ease of access to information.
The bespoke visual style we created was a very deliberate intention to build strong engagement but not be stereotypical for sex work. Personification characters were carefully crafted, and colour palettes were decidedly different. We represented a broad range of sex workers across gender and age demographics, careful not to typecast any of the workers.
We also introduced a creative element of using text messaging graphics to lead and finish each video. This was based on an insightful belief that sex workers would relate to this style of messaging and embrace it.
Outcome
Engagement with the videos through WorkSafe’s social media channels and website has been strong since the information resources were launched. As it’s quite an insular industry, it is expected that word of mouth will fuel even more engagement among sex workers and industry operators.