Save the Children: Childhood Enders campaign

SUMMARY

Save the Children, a non-governmental organisation, created a video series to raise awareness of serious events that threaten children worldwide, in order to promote its End of Childhood report.

Save the Children had to generate awareness, conversation and empathy around the End of Childhood Report and Index, which evaluates countries based on a number of serious events that threaten children.

Unboxing videos are a global social phenomenon – especially with children – with 6.5 years' worth of unboxing footage uploaded in 2013 alone.

Save the Children created videos featuring three children unboxing what they thought were toys, but were actually objects that reflected a 'childhood ender' ammunition (forced conflict) or a positive pregnancy test (childhood pregnancy).

To date, the video series has received more than 2.3 million views across all platforms, reaching audiences in 36 countries and garnering nearly 250,000 engagements.

Campaign details

Brand: Save the Children

Agency: Powell Tate

Campaign overview

Childhood should be a time for children to play, learn, and develop to their full potential. However, nearly one in four children around the world are being robbed of their childhoods, simply because of who they are or where they live.

To bring this crisis to light, Save the Children launched their first annual End of Childhood Report and Index (https://campaigns.savethechildren.net/end-of-childhood), which evaluated countries based on a number of serious events that threaten children, including violence, early pregnancy, and forced labor.

For a launch of such significance, a simple press release wouldn't do. So Save the Children tapped Weber Shandwick to generate awareness, media and conversation, and empathy around the End of Childhood Report.

Research and insights

In order to raise awareness of this global epidemic, we had to reach a global audience. Which meant solidifying a single strategy to engage people across six continents So we began our research into an execution with the reach and relevance needed to deliver our message. That led us to unboxing videos.

With view-counts in the hundreds of millions, unboxing videos are a global social phenomenon – especially with children – featuring someone opening a product (e.g. a toy, a phone, a TV, etc.) and describing every step of the 'unboxing' process.

The genre has seen massive growth over the past few years. From 2010-2014, the number of YouTube videos with 'unboxing' in the headline increased 871%, with 6.5 years' worth of unboxing footage uploaded in 2013 alone As far as their global popularity goes, unboxing traffic is coming from all over the world. The current top five regions include: Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, Philippines, and Greece (US ranks 17th).

The challenge

  • We had no paid media budget to execute this campaign. We had to figure out a way to reach a global audience without spending a dime to promote it. So to expand our organic reach, we tapped into Save the Children's regional Facebook pages around the globe to help circulate our video.

  • On top of that, we would turn to creative media methods—using search optimization to plant our series among real unboxing videos on Facebook and intercept viewers when they least expected.

  • Along with having no money allocated for paid media, Save the Children's overall budget wasn't enough to cover all of the production and agency fee. But such an important cause deserves attention and we were more than willing to incur some of the cost ourselves, committing time and dollars, in order to drive awareness of the campaign.

  • After uncovering the ubiquitous popularity of unboxing, we saw an opportunity to leverage the built-in equity of the genre and create a video of our own for a low cost. Our spin played off the usual unboxing construct but in a different – and disruptive – way.

    Creative execution

Our videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch? list=PL5r9JTlp4xXWO0kWOCs3ThG4cZO4OY13d&time_continue=1&v=aOTdpdn9pAo)

featured three children 'unboxing' what they thought were toys; however, each box actually contained an object that reflected a 'childhood ender' - a pickaxe (forced labor), a positive pregnancy test (childhood pregnancy), and ammunition (forced conflict). This provocative twist helped us capture authentic emotional reactions from the kids and bring some much-needed attention to this global issue.

Targeting a global audience, we needed to ensure our content felt native and natural to the viewers. So while there was a single compilation video, we also had three individual videos each in a different language (English, Spanish, and Mandarin). This enabled Save the Children's many regional Facebook pages to post the video that best suited their locale, acting as our worldwide syndication network. From the US to India to Peru, the campaign made its way to three dozen countries.

We launched it all on International Children's Day, arranging a daylong takeover of Facebook's own Nonprofits on Facebook page. We appealed to their one million Facebook followers by posting a steady stream of content, including a

Facebook Live video (https://www.facebook.com/savethechildren/videos/10155252008826597/)

with Dr. Jill Biden and Save the Children CEO Carolyn Miles during which we streamed our Unboxing videos.

Results

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