How U Feelin?
Issue 16 | September 2010
Agency
Saatchi & Saatchi
Creative Team
Howard Green & Pablo Videla, Lovisa Almgren & Rory McCaskill
Production Team
Digital Producer: Will Misselbrook; Director/Editor: Dennis Lui; Production Company Producer: Garfield Kempton@RSA Films; Digital Creative Director: Martin Buckwell
Other Credits
Executive Creative Directors: Paul Silburn & Kate Stanners; Account Director: Liz Griffiths; Account Executive: Daniela Ceresa; Planner: Jane Cantellow
Date
18th January 2010
Background
ChildLine is a free helpline service for children aged between eight and 16 funded by the NSPCC. The website is a place for children to go if they are being bullied, abused or are in any kind of trouble.
The immediate task was to let children know they could now express how they’re feeling online as well as by phone.
Idea
Using music and words, a fully interactive campaign was created around ‘mash-ups’.
World famous musician Paul Hartnoll from Orbital and hot digital film director Dennis Liu recorded and filmed real kids expressing themselves in just a single word or sound.
Paul created a unique music track, which Dennis then projected along with accompanying images live onto the walls of an urban landscape. The footage became a commercial, which drove kids to a website where an online remixer tool allowed them to make their very own mash-up and enter it into a competition to make a real TV ad.
It was the first ever ChildLine campaign to talk directly to its main target audience, children, treating them with respect and without being patronizing.
Results
Over 700 remixes were entered into the competition. The winning remix, 'In My Head' by xRach14x was chosen by Paul Hartnoll himself and aired on MTV Shows at 8:15pm, Sunday, 21st March 2010.
The remixer tool helped raise awareness of the ChildLine site, which saw an increase in traffic of 65%.
Our Thoughts
The thinking behind this work is a whole lot cleverer than it looks.
Most companies build websites on the ‘Field of Dreams’ principle. Build it and they will come. But, actually, they won’t - unless they just want your address or phone number. You have to give people a reason to come to your site and then you have to give them an incentive for returning.
For Child Line, the task is especially urgent because they need children to know who they are and to remember how to get in touch, should they have to.
I would be interested to know the numbers here but my guess is this would have got at least 100,000 children going to childline.org for the first time. And they would have hung around to look at the mash-ups before exploring other parts of the site and logging the fact that if things go wrong for them, there is help available.