The Women's Aid Organisation breaks down love bombing with repetitive gift-wrapping patterns

In tandem with Domestic Violence Awareness month in October, the Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) in Malaysia is looking to raise awareness of the practice of love bombing with a new campaign. 

Done in collaboration with Mediabrands Content Studio (MBCS) the campaign aims to raise awareness of love bombing, which refers to the practice of overwhelming someone with excessive displays of affection, attention, and love in a relationship. 

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The visuals for the campaign take the form of gift wrapping to symbolise the façade of affection and warmth employed by the perpetrators of love bombings. Repetitive patterns, akin to the unending cycles of abuse, are meant to highlight the various forms of abuse that victims are subjected to, from physical to verbal.

By visually illustrating the pattern, the campaign aims to unwrap the often-overlooked nature of love bombing and to urge society to recognise it as a grave issue.

The out-of-home led campaign was done in collaboration with sister media agency Initiative. It will run for a month with placements at key shopping areas such as Pavillion KL and Fahrenheit 88 to drive greater awareness to Malaysians and will extend messaging through social media.

"Individuals are inevitably trapped within a vicious cycle as love bombers use flattery, gifts and constant communication to create dependency and play with the self-esteem of the victim," said Sumitra Visvanathan, executive director of Women’s Aid Organisation. "We’re grateful to have partnered with the MBCS team who have cleverly evoked these messages across the striking creatives of this campaign. Abuse is often masked in the cloak of love, and it is important for us to raise this message so more people are aware of this manipulative cycle of abuse.”

“Domestic violence campaigns often highlight physical and verbal abuse; however, this act of love bombing is categorised as psychological and emotional abuse, and often goes unspoken,” added Eddy Nazarullah, creative director of MBCS. “We landed on this theme through the personal family experience of someone on our team.”

In conjunction with the month, WAO has also scheduled a series of webinars, streamed through the WAO Facebook page.

Topics include "Unpacking the Domestic Violence Act 1994", "Love Bombing: Recognising the Red Flag"" and Stalking Unmasked: Identifying, Understanding & Preventing."

The news comes shortly after IPG Mediabrands launched KINESSO, a tech-driven performance unit that aims to deliver intelligence that moves brands forward earlier this year. The new entity was created through the integration of three existing brands in the agency's portfolio: Kinesso, Reprise, and Matterkind.

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