David Schwimmer Partners with Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment to Spread #ThatsHarassment PSA Throughout NYC

The New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment Commissioner Julie Menin today announced that #ThatsHarassment, the innovative and impactful video campaign conceived by actor and producer David Schwimmer and director Sigal Avin, will run on City-owned media properties Taxi TV and NYC Media for the duration of 2018. This timely and provocative video series will reach a wide, diverse audience of New Yorkers and visitors to the city, promoting crucial conversations around sexual misconduct and gender inequality at a moment when these issues have never been more relevant.

"#ThatsHarassment is a phenomenal opportunity to further the current dialogue about gender-based misconduct, and we are proud to expand the audience of this vital public awareness campaign," said Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment Commissioner Julie Menin. "Our office has been hard at work on efforts to level the playing field for women in the entertainment industry for quite some time now, and #ThatsHarassment fits in perfectly with the de Blasio Administration's priorities. I commend David Schwimmer and Sigal Avin for their foresight and drive to bring this program to life."

"My mother, my sister, countless female colleagues and friends have all experienced some form of sexual harassment in their lifetime," said David Schwimmer, creator of #ThatsHarassment. "Now I'm a father of a young daughter and I'm angry and concerned about the rise in, and our culture's acceptance of, totally unacceptable behavior by men towards women. Men who demean, deride, discredit, harass and assault women - no matter what their position of power - need to be held accountable."

The #ThatsHarassment campaign was originally created by Schwimmer and Avin as a series of short films in April 2017 - well before the #MeToo revelations and all of the shockwaves that have followed in its wake. Now transformed into 30-second videos, the series will reach a much wider audience across various NYC content platforms. Taxi TV is available on video screens in the city's fleet of 13,000 taxicabs, generating well over 100,000 impressions per day. NYC Media is the City's official broadcast network, reaching over 18 million households in the metropolitan area.

The campaign is made up of five videos. Each dramatizes a different scenario in which sexual harassment can occur, and all of them are based on real accounts - some of which are strikingly similar to ones that have appeared in news headlines in recent months. They include: "The Boss" starring David Schwimmer and Zazie Beetz, "The Coworker" starring Grace Gummer and Joseph Sikora, "The Politician" starring Emmy Rossum and HARRY Lennix, "The Actor" starring Noah Emmerich and CRISTELA Alonzo, and "The Doctor" starring Cynthia Nixon and Michael Kelly.

In tandem with MOME's efforts to broaden the reach of #ThatsHarassment, the Ad Council has launched a national campaign to distribute the PSAs across a variety of broadcast, cable, and digital platforms. The full-length short films and PSAs are currently airing both digitally and on television by major media companies including ABC/Freeform, Amazon, CBS, The CW, Fox, FX, Hulu, Starz and Showtime.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride