While some media professionals refrain from the responsibility of using their platform to address issues that matter, fearless leaders like Sophia Cranshaw take on the task. As mtvU vice president of on-air promotions, Cranshaw won an Emmy Award for her promotional spots on the genocide in Darfur and a Peabody Award for producing “Half of Us,” a series on mental illness. Most recently Cranshaw has helped launch the “mtvU Against Our Will Campaign.” In partnership with Free the Slaves, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) and Polaris Project, the campaign aims to support the growing activism of college students to free an estimated 27 million sex and labor slaves throughout the world, including on American soil.
Cranshaw spoke with rolling out about her strategies to appeal to diverse audiences, selecting social issues to highlight and how human trafficking affects us all.
How do you navigate the challenges of appealing to a diverse and multicultural audience to ensure that all voices are represented?
We make it a point to be diverse by not just placing people but going into the culture as well. If we pick an ethnic group I try to move left of center so it’s not what you normally think about a group. We also do animation where it’s not about seeing the individual but seeing the circumstance with relationships, changing majors and mental health issues.
How do you determine which social causes to spotlight for promotional campaigns?
We let the college audience decide. Most recently we launched the human trafficking campaign. There are an estimated 300 organizations on campuses already fighting this so it makes it easier for us to talk to student activists and help decrease misconceptions about sex and slave labor in America.
What is your strategy for making the issue of human trafficking relatable to an audience that feels removed from it?
As far as slave labor is concerned we are all attached to it because it happens in restaurants, farms, and factories but we don’t know about it. On the sex side the average age that a man buys sex for the first time is 21 and that’s within our demographic of 18-25 year-olds. Most of these girls in the commercialized sexual exploitation business are held against their will. We are trying to make people aware of the issue so they can make decisions.
