For a Better Life in Prague's Street Cleaners film, created by Lowe Prague in April 2013, turns the city's unsung cleaners into symbols of civic responsibility.
How For a Better Life in Prague Made Street Cleaners the Face of Civic Pride
Street Cleaners is a 2013 public interest film created by Lowe Prague for For a Better Life in Prague, released in Czechia in April 2013, that reframes urban littering as a question of personal character by placing the city's overlooked sanitation workers at the centre of the story, using the tagline "Be Cool. Keep the City Clean."
For a Better Life in Prague commissioned the campaign with a civic mission: shift public attitudes toward littering in the Czech capital by making the consequences of the behaviour human rather than abstract. Rather than relying on penalty messaging or infographic-driven awareness formats, the campaign chose film as its sole medium, producing a single asset designed to generate empathy and social reflection. The choice of film over outdoor or print was deliberate — moving image allows for the kind of character revelation that static formats cannot sustain, and in Prague, a city with a strongly visual public culture, the format carried weight.
In Czechia, television accounted for approximately forty percent of all advertising expenditure in 2013, according to research published via shs-conferences.org, making film-led communication a culturally familiar and structurally credible vehicle for public interest messaging. The campaign entered this environment not as a broadcaster-funded public service announcement in the conventional sense, but as a creatively authored piece of work from a commercial agency — Lowe Prague — applying brand storytelling discipline to a civic brief. That positioning distinguishes Street Cleaners from the standard municipal awareness poster and places it within the growing international tradition of documentary-inflected public interest advertising. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100.
For a Better Life in Prague grounded Street Cleaners in a consumer insight that is both local and universal: people are more likely to change behaviour when they see the human cost of their actions than when they are told the rules. In Prague in 2013, street cleaning was largely invisible labour — the workers who maintained the city's public spaces occupied no meaningful role in civic storytelling, despite the direct relationship between pedestrian behaviour and their working conditions. Lowe Prague identified that gap and built the entire strategic proposition around it.
The tagline "Be Cool. Keep the City Clean." is strategically precise. It addresses a psychographic rather than a demographic, targeting the social identity of the viewer — the desire to be seen as modern, self-aware, and considerate — rather than issuing a civic instruction. This approach reflects a broader shift in public service communication away from authoritative directives and toward values-based framing, a technique that organisations including WARC have documented as more durable in driving attitude change across European markets.
In the competitive landscape of Czech public interest communication, campaigns addressing urban cleanliness have historically leaned on municipal signage and fine-based deterrence. Street Cleaners differentiates itself by choosing empathy over enforcement. Comparable international public service campaigns such as Keep Britain Tidy's work in the United Kingdom and the City of Amsterdam's behavioural nudge programmes share the same strategic DNA — reframing littering as a social norm violation rather than a legal one — but Street Cleaners executes this logic through a specifically Prague-rooted visual and human context. According to research indexed via shs-conferences.org, internet advertising represented approximately nineteen percent of Czech advertising in 2013, underscoring that film remained the dominant storytelling format for reaching broad civic audiences in Czechia that year.
Matthieu Jorrot directed Street Cleaners, bringing a documentary sensibility to material that could easily have resolved into sentiment or caricature. The film's creative team at Lowe Prague included executive creative director Julio Wallovits, art directors Ian Adams and Jan Koudela, and copywriters Julio Wallovits and Štěpán Tyller, as catalogued by adRuby. Director of photography Jakub Dvorsky and editor Filip Malasek completed the core production team, according to the same source.
The craft decision that defines the film is its commitment to observational realism. Jorrot's direction does not aestheticise the street cleaners' labour or render it heroic in a cinematic shorthand sense. Instead, the film allows the workers' daily experience to accumulate its own quiet authority — a technique drawn from documentary practice that produces a different kind of emotional response than scripted drama. In Prague's specific urban landscape, with its combination of medieval architecture and contemporary foot traffic, the visual contrast between the city's celebrated beauty and the unglamorous work required to maintain it carries implicit argument without needing to state it directly.
Wallovits's dual role as executive creative director and copywriter on the project suggests a tightly integrated creative vision, where the verbal logic of the campaign and its overall strategic positioning were held by the same sensibility. The tagline "Be Cool. Keep the City Clean." is short enough to function as social currency — repeatable, transferable, and free of bureaucratic register. Ian Adams and Jan Koudela's art direction supports a visual grammar that prioritises authenticity over polish, consistent with the documentary mode Jorrot brought to the direction. For a single-asset campaign, the production achieves a level of craft coherence that reflects the seriousness with which Lowe Prague approached the public interest brief.
No verified performance data for Street Cleaners is publicly available. According to searches across adruby.com, Pdfs Semanticscholar, Search Issuelab, scispace.com, and prensario.net, no published figures exist for awareness lift, behavioural change, media reach, or audience response associated with the campaign. No awards are recorded for Street Cleaners in the Cannes Lions, Effie, D&AD, Clio, One Show, Webby, or WARC databases.
Structural analysis of the campaign's effectiveness logic, however, supports a measured reading of its potential impact. Street Cleaners operates on the most durable mechanism in public interest communication: it makes the abstract personal. By centering a figure that audiences in Prague encounter daily but rarely consider, the film creates the conditions for perspective shift — the psychological precondition for behaviour change — without relying on guilt or penalty. This is a structurally sound approach for a single-film campaign with no documented media buy, where earned attention and social sharing would have been the primary distribution mechanism.
The campaign's limitation is its singularity. One film asset, however well-crafted, lacks the repetition and cross-channel presence that sustained behaviour change campaigns typically require. For a Better Life in Prague and Lowe Prague produced a credible piece of civic storytelling, but the architecture of a single film is better suited to shifting perception than to driving measurable behaviour change at scale. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects this balance: strong creative intent and craft execution, constrained by the absence of a broader campaign system and no verifiable outcomes data.
Street Cleaners is a public interest film created by Lowe Prague for For a Better Life in Prague, released in Czechia in April 2013. The campaign uses the tagline "Be Cool. Keep the City Clean." and places Prague's sanitation workers at the centre of a civic argument about littering and personal responsibility.
Lowe Prague created Street Cleaners in 2013. The team included executive creative director and copywriter Julio Wallovits, art directors Ian Adams and Jan Koudela, copywriter Štěpán Tyller, film director Matthieu Jorrot, director of photography Jakub Dvorsky, and editor Filip Malasek, as catalogued by adRuby.
The campaign's message was "Be Cool. Keep the City Clean." Rather than instructing audiences through rules or penalties, the campaign addressed personal identity and social values, framing considerate behaviour in Prague's public spaces as a marker of character and self-awareness rather than legal compliance.
No awards are recorded for Street Cleaners. Searches of the Cannes Lions, Effie, D&AD, Clio Awards, One Show, Webby Awards, and WARC databases return no entries for this campaign, and no verifiable trade press reviews from Campaign, Ad Age, or Adweek have been identified for the work.
Film was the sole medium for Street Cleaners because moving image sustains the kind of character revelation that static formats cannot. In Czechia in 2013, television represented approximately forty percent of advertising expenditure, according to research via shs-conferences.org, making film a culturally familiar and credible vehicle for civic storytelling in Prague.
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