Jason Loader

Brief

BHF’s annual (Food4Thought) campaign educates children to make healthier and more informed food choices, helping them develop healthy food patterns now so as to reduce their risk of heart problems later in life. Our brief was to raise awareness about what’s in junk food, as well as the marketing tricks used to sell it.

Strategy

Using the paradigm of a typical console game, the child’s chosen 3D character could freely wander and explore an urban landscape. The aim was to find and complete 20 tasks/games. These contained educational messages about healthy eating or examples of junk food marketing tricks. On completion, the child could see how much healthy v junk food they’d purchased, what tricks they’d fallen for and how much personal information they’d volunteered away. These stats were subsequently used by BHF in a message to parents.

The campaign was supplemented with offline materials distributed to schools such as “X Ray” glasses revealing hidden site messages and by social media, including profile pages on sites like Piczo and Bebo. The campaign was covered by HELLO! magazine, The Guardian and the BBC.

Result

During the 6 week campaign there were over 700,000 unique visitors to the
site. Independent research showed over half of those exposed said they would consume less junk food, with 65% promising to eat more fruit and vegetables.

Feedback

“Enormously engaging and creative”
New Media Age

“It’s the first time we’d done rich media and we were surprised and very pleased at how successful it was. Digital is now an area we are looking to explore more and grow. The campaign exceeded our expectations”.
Lisa-Maree David,
campaign project manager, BHF