A megaphone-toting character in superhero garb will be out in London every day this week (23-27
March), yelling slogans collected from the public on the streets and through the social networking site Twitter. It is all part of the preparations for Saturday’s Put People First march for “jobs, justice and climate” organised by leading charities and trade unions. The caped street orator, dubbed
MegaMouth, will mingle with shoppers and office workers, asking for their views about world poverty, climate change and the
recession. The challenge is to say it all in no more than 140 characters – the limit for a Twitter message. The best slogans collected face-to-face and online will be added to MegaMouth’s repertoire of bite-sized barbs. On Saturday 28 March, MegaMouth will join supporters of the charity ActionAid on the Put People First march from Victoria Embankment to Hyde Park. The march
is intended to give a clear message to Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and other leaders attending the G20 summit on 2 April. ActionAid campaigner Emma Harbour said: “Banks are crashing,
world hunger is growing, and climate change is going out of control. It’s a huge crisis, but it is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the system so it puts people first. “We want everyone to join ActionAid and the 125 other organisations on Saturday’s march. People are angry about the situation. We are giving them a chance to be creatively angry, by
coming up with a snappy slogan that will catch the attention of the busy leaders at the G20 summit.” MegaMouth’s support team includes a camera crew who will feed video clips
and photos to ActionAid’s website, and a ‘twitterer’ who will give a running text message commentary on
MegaMouth’s London tour. The idea and the technology behind MegaMouth were developed for ActionAid by the digital marketing agency Nonsense. Visit www.actionaid.org.uk/megamouth to see the latest on the campaign and submit a slogan.
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
