Role Reversals

The Role Reversal Guide provides five high-impact tactics that flip perspectives, identities or expectations to unlock empathy, outrage, humour or insight. Whether reversing the lens, time-travelling through culture, or subverting a media moment, this guide helps brands reveal deeper truths by messing with the expected.

What’s Inside

• 5 powerful campaign formats: from power flips to past-meets-present provocations
• Campaigns from Maybelline, Burger King, Lay’s, Telefónica, Beyond Meat, EOS, FP7 McCann and more
• GPT prompts for each reversal style to quickly explore powerful POV shifts
• A cheat sheet for tackling bias, creating tension or rethinking product storytelling

Sneak Peek: Flip the Power Dynamic

Brief: Make people see the cruelty of sex trafficking from a fresh perspective.

Voiceless Women by McCann used the recorded words of sex buyers as voiceover for victims of trafficking. The reversal was chilling—placing control in the mouths of those who’d suffered most. It forced audiences to see the story with gut-punch clarity. Other campaigns flipped power too:

• DogCheck transformed overweight dogs into humans, reversing the pet-owner lens to spark understanding.
• The Walk reversed pet abandonment by casting people as the rejected party.
• Skin So Soft by EOS flipped animal ads—letting pets celebrate human softness.

Each one gave voice, visibility or agency to those who usually go unheard.