Mark Woerde

Mark Woerde (1973, The Netherlands) is a Dutch social activist and writer.

Early life 

Mark Woerde was born in the Netherlands.

He graduated from University of Amsterdam.

In 2000, Woerde co-founded the renowned Dutch advertising agency Lemz, which became part of Havas Group in 2016. This transition put Woerde in a position where he could leave the advertising company and focus solely on LetsHeal.

In 2011, Mark Woerde published the book “How Advertising Will Heal The World And Your” which lays the foundations for a radical paradigm shift in branding and advertising.

Social activities 

Woerde was the driving force behind the success of Neighbor Day (Burendag), an early prosocial activity to stimulate social cohesion. It was developed by Woerde and his partners at advertising agency Lemz; Peter de Lange and Remco Marinus for coffee brand Douwe Egberts. Neighbor Day was started in 2006 and has evolved into an annual tradition in the Netherlands. Neighbor Day inspires people to look after their neighbors, spending time together and making their neighborhood even more beautiful. After three years, Woerde managed Neighbor Day to earn the participation of the Dutch Royal Family and the Oranje Fonds.

In 2013, the Dutch branch of Terre des hommes, noting that efforts to combat child sex tourism in impoverished countries had resulted in pedophiles instead seeking victims online, joined forces with Mark Woerde and his team at advertising agency Lemz that at first preferred to remain anonymous to create the animated, photorealistic image of a 10-year-old Filipina girl named Sweetie. The Sweetie operation took almost 2 years of preparation. In a period of 10 weeks more than 20,000 predators interacted with Woerde's team. Eventually over 1,000 predators from 71 countries were identified and handed over to Interpol. Most of the identified predators could be identified via bits of information revealed by the team using a fake identity as a 10 year old Filipino kid. Sweetie as an avatar/virtual girl proved to be especially useful in a smaller but difficult to track down number of predators. The information was given to the local police or Interpol. Over one billion people have seen the operation in the evening news.

After receiving a letter of recognition from the United Nations, Woerde and his team admitted to the creative industry that they were behind this initiative. Woerde decided to give one public interview to the popular TV show Humberto Tan’s RTL Late Night to explain the intervention and to make clear that he was no longer involved in Terre des hommes, Sweetie or police activities.

In 2017 Mark Woerde and his team from Lemz and LetsHeal developed together with The Elijah Interfaith Institute the groundbreaking, record-breaking and award-winning media project “Make Friends Across Religions” that brought to the man on the street a friendship call by the world’s most prominent faith leaders, such as Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama.

Awards 

The Sweetie campaign won several important awards, such as the D&DA White and Black Pencil and the Cannes Lions Grand Prix For Good.

Mark Woerde won the Global Business & Interfaith Peace Medal in 2018 for his project "Make Friends Across Religions" and received this from former secretary of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon.

References 

Living people
1973 births
Dutch writers