The “JFK Unsilenced” campaign which was created by Dublin agency Rothco for The Times, Ireland Edition, has been shortlisted eight times in different categories for the forthcoming One Show, the largest advertising awards programme in North America and the largest non-profit advertising awards programme in the world. The awards will be held as part of Creative Week in New York between May 7th-11th.
The agency has also been shortlisted in the Film- Long Form category for its work with Soar, the youth empowerment and advocacy group.
The JFK Unsilenced campaign recreated the speech that President John F. Kennedy was due to deliver on the day of his assassination, using cutting-edge voice recognition software to match his words with the text of the speech he never gave on that ill-fated day in Dallas.
In this speech, the former US president, who was shot in Dallas, Texas on November 22 1963, had planned to discuss how “ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city, company, or a country” and how “those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible, will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.”
The project, which involved isolating sound fragments from previous speeches President Kennedy gave, was undertaken in co-operation with Irish creative agency Rothco and Cereproc, a speech synthesis company based in Scotland. Sound engineers reviewed 831 of JFK’s previous speeches, creating a database of more than 100,000 phonetic sound units, to recreate the speech as it would have been delivered had President Kennedy reached the Dallas Trade Mart.
Since it was launched, the JFK Unsilenced campaign has received critical acclaim around the world and many industry commentators see it as a serious contender for a Cannes Lions award in June.
