World Vision / Childhood is sacred

We created this pitch-wining campaign for VCCP in the summer of 2018. 

The brief was to come up with a new brand positioning and a digital Christmas campaign. 

BRAND IDEA: The positioning we chose was ‘Childhood is Sacred’. WV are a Christian charity and this idea fell nicely into the centre of the Venn diagram of their faith and their work. The manifesto film on the left captures the spirit of this new positioning. 

The first expression of this was to be a DIGITAL CHRISTMAS CAMPAIGN  about children becoming slaves. We advised strongly against showing pictures of children with guns and suchlike as it turns people off. Christmas is a time of warmth and brutal imagery felt immature and off-putting.

Instead, we wanted to tug at the heart strings by talking of what it means when a childhood is lost - as it is so often is in the cases of child soldiers, child sex workers and child labourers. 

CAMPAIGN  IDEA: in the UK. when a child loses a toy on the street,  it can feel like the end of the world for them. So how much worse must it be for a child who loses everything as a result of child slavery?

We demonstrated this by leaving 2,000 ‘lost’ teddy bears in key locations around the UK where the child sponsorship demographic was most pronounced.  

Each bear (named Hope) was fitted with a tag on its wrist explaining that losing a toy is heartbreaking for a child. But children at risk of being abducted into slavery could lose everything this Christmas.  They were asked to share a photo of the bear on social media and find out more about child sponsorship. They were asked to #sharehope.

The campaign was launched with a teaser campaign in local and national newspapers. This was then followed up by the ambient campaign, which was supported by local PR stories and the World Vision social media pages.