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View AllDNA&STONE Wins Ad Age Small Agency Award for Gun Safety Campaign Built on “Radical Empathy”
Seattle-based ICOM member DNA&STONE has taken home a 2026 Ad Age Small Agency Award for a campaign that did something most gun-safety messaging doesn’t: it left politics out of it entirely.
The winning work, created for Seattle Children’s Hospital, promoted free gun lock boxes to keep firearms secured — and kids safe — without lecturing gun owners or wading into the broader gun-control debate. Ad Age called it “an apolitical gun safety campaign that worked.”
Seattle Children’s original brief asked DNA&STONE to promote a stricter “triple safe” protocol — unloading a firearm and storing it and its ammunition separately. But after talking with real gun owners, the agency’s team realized that approach would shut the conversation down before it started.
So they pitched a different idea: quick-access lock boxes, which let gun owners keep their firearms secure from kids while still being able to reach them fast if needed. Seattle Children’s, whose priority was simply keeping children safe, was open to the shift.
That’s what’s so great about our relationship with Seattle Children’s,” the agency said. “They just want to keep kids safe and are flexible on the best way to get that done.
The campaign deliberately avoided the shame-or-scare tactics common in gun-safety PSAs. Instead, it started from an uncomfortable but honest premise: gun owners buy guns to protect their families, and any message that ignores that will fail to land.
DNA&STONE calls this approach Radical Empathy: the idea that behavior only changes once you’ve genuinely felt what drives it, rather than judging it from the outside.
To bring the concept to life, the agency staged the Family Fast Draw, a real competition held at a working gun range with real gun owners and their kids. Children were offered oversized carnival prizes if they could get to a locked-up firearm (a dummy training model) before their parents could unlock it. The catch: only the parents knew the lock box code. The kids never stood a chance — the parents opened theirs in seconds.
The unscripted footage from that day became the campaign’s PSA films, giving the message a documentary honesty that a traditional shoot couldn’t have replicated.
The campaign helped Seattle Children’s distribute more than 4,500 free locking devices. It also opened doors: the American Medical Association reached out to DNA&STONE directly, citing the campaign’s original take on a difficult subject.
“We’re big believers in Radical Empathy,” said Matt McCain, Founder of DNA&STONE. “This firearm safety work shows the power of trading your own perception for your audience’s perspective. This recognition is further validation that our approach leads to effective, unexpected work.”
Candi Nicholson, Director of Brand & Creative Services at Seattle Children’s, echoed the shift in tone the work made possible: “This idea completely shifts the conversation we can have with gun owners who have kids at home.”
The win comes a year after DNA&STONE took Silver at the Small Agency of the Year Northwest awards, and roughly a year after the merger that formed DNA&STONE from DNA and Little Hands of Stone. For the agency, this recognition is less about the trophy itself and more about confirmation that its way of working — cutting through assumptions to connect with audiences honestly — is resonating.
