No Hunger

Background

55 million children around the world suffer from hunger. 19 million are malnourished. Five million die each year. It would cost €3bn to eradicate the problem. Action Against Hunger has developed practical ways of dealing with malnutrition and wanted to spread information about RUTF, as it’s called, as well as generate donations.

Idea

The agency wanted the theme of the campaign to be about participation. So, to encourage ordinary people to become participants in the battle against hunger they decided to focus on asking just one person to help. That one person is Al Gore. He did a good job raising awareness of climate change with his film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, so perhaps he could do the same again for children in poverty and distress.

The campaign is a public appeal to the Nobel Peace Prize winner to direct a documentary about the fact that these children can be given the chance to live full lives with RUTF, an energy-dense foodstuff. The campaign is centred round www.pideseloaalgore.org, where visitors can petition the former Vice-President and find out more about hunger in the world.

Results

Many well-known actors, actresses and film directors in Spain have publicly declared their support for the campaign to get Al Gore to direct the new movie. So far, moe than 32,000 messages of support have been logged on the website.

Our Thoughts

This is emotional blackmail of a public figure and because it’s so cheeky it has a social currency it wouldn’t otherwise merit. I’m waiting for the content on the site to get richer and deeper, perhaps as negotiations with Al Gore unfold. If there isn’t a full-length movie in that, there will certainly be some hilarious scenes. Shackleton seem to approach every job they do asking, ‘How can we do this differently?’. Further evidence here they are one of the world’s five most interesting agencies.