Peace Pills

Peace is a hard sell. People tune out lectures about polarization and hate, especially when the lecture seems to come from the side they already disagree with. And a lecture mostly reaches the people who agreed already.

But nobody skips an ad that promises to fix their sex life. Pharma has taught everyone how to read that kind of ad: the symptom, the promise, the bottle, take one daily.

The Peace Force, the peacebuilding brand Buena created with the Alliance for Peacebuilding, needed acts of peace that people would actually watch and pass on. So we borrowed the format.

Peace Pills: a supplement line in candy-colored bottles, each one treating a side effect of hate. Hate causes impotence; peace makes you hard again. Hate causes hair loss; peace keeps you hairy.

Hate causes skin disorders; peace makes you glow. Hate causes anxiety; peace makes you happy. The labels come in pink, blue and yellow, set in tall condensed type, and every one ends the same way: take one daily.

The joke is the message. Hate is bad for the people who carry it, and peace is a daily habit anyone can pick up. The bottles promise everything a supplement ad promises, and the only active ingredient is choosing not to hate.

The promo opens on a swastika, the word Antifa and the Q of QAnon, each drooping like a bad night. Then the claim, deadpan: studies show hate causes impotence (seriously).

So we made a life-changing solution to fix it. Peace Pills arrive bottle by bottle, hard, hot, hairy and happy, under one instruction: take peace daily. Each bottle gets its own beat, with the words landing one at a time, at the speed you'd read them.

It ends on the Peace Force card: this is a Peace Force act of peace, join us at thepeaceforce.org. We wrote the script, designed the bottles and labels, and cut the film.