Advertisers try to do good!

We are a small group of filmmakers and digital media practitioners who have been concerned for some time about Tibet’s struggle for independence as well as China’s treatment and lack of recognition for the basic human rights of native Tibetans.

With the Olympics being held in China this year we, like many people around the world, hoped that such an event would help ‘shine the light’ on Tibet’s plight.

Indeed, with the running of the Olympic Torch Relay and the subsequent worldwide demonstrations, we felt confident that the issues surrounding Tibet would receive enormous media exposure.

However with the natural disasters in both Burma and China rightfully dominating the world media - and thus eclipsing the Tibet issue - we felt the need to somehow help revitalise discussion on Tibet around the world.

As media practitioners, we pride ourselves on our creative ability to make films or media campaigns that have the ability to cut through the ‘media clutter’ in an entertaining but informative way.

So we decided to use our skills to create a petition website and in particular a ‘game’ that may - with your help - become a viral worldwide phenomena and thus help get Tibet and Human Rights back in the forefront of peoples minds leading up to, during and after the Beijing Olympics.

We know there have been numerous petitions supporting Tibet in the past and that most probably all of Tibet’s core supporters had already signed at least one so our challenge was how do we get yet another petition out to a broader audience?

In keeping with the spirit of an event like the Olympics we decided to embed the petition in a ‘sporting’ event or a game called ‘The Levitation Monitor’ that is ‘fun’ and perhaps even a little bit cheeky - you can chose to tickle either part with a feather and thus have them rise up the Levitation Monitor or alternatively whip either party with a wet noodle and have them go down.

In light of the recent Torch Relay demonstrations, we were aware that there was more than one point of view on Tibet and although our petition firmly supports Tibet’s quest for Human Rights we wanted to take the 'middle path' (ie democratic) and give all parties a chance to express their opinion. Our belief being that by designing the game this way we will have a greater chance of the petition being circulated to a greater number of people who may be ill informed or even completely unaware of Tibet’s plight.

Should this project work and attract both sides of the debate we believe that it may become an international press news story in its own right.

You can check it out www.tibetpetition.com

As mentioned earlier the ‘game’ is intentionally ‘cheeky’ so prior to commencement of its creation and being careful not to cause any offence to the Dali Lama we sought the advice and ‘approval’ from Ven. Dungyud Rinpoche in Sydney who gave his blessing on this project.

As you can imagine the Chinese Government were unfortunately not so forthcoming!

We hope that you find our approach to 'marketing' such a cause novel and innovative and that you would help us seed this petition by you emailing your data base with a link to the site.

Obviously with the Olympics soon approaching time is of the essence so if you like what we've done we would appreciate it if you could forward to as many contacts as possible.

Regards to All