Situation

A child’s brain develops the most during their first 1000 days – and the right nutrition, loving care and stimulation from their caregivers is key for them to reach their full development potential. Despite this, research shows that fathers don’t engage in their children’s early learning to the same extent as mothers.

Brief

UNICEF & H&M Foundation wanted to increase global awareness of the importance of engaging in children’s early development (ECD) among all caregivers and especially inspire fathers to be a part of their children’s development earlier on.

Objectives

Create an initiative that was inspiring enough to break through the digital clutter, spark conversation and build global awareness and knowledge of ECD.

A total media reach of 150 million impressions.

To get visibility and mentions in 10 - 15 countries.

To get engagement on social media proceeding previous campaign results 10 000 interactions, comments and shares).

Parents who speak in baby talk during their child’s first months help boost their cognitive skills. Despite this, fathers don’t use baby talk as much as mothers do. UNICEF & H&M Foundation wanted to inspire fathers all over the world to get involve in their children’s early learning. So we created ”Baby Talk For Dads” an interactive course in the world’s most important language for boosting your baby’s brain, developed to help dads connect with their infants and feel more comfortable using baby talk.

With fun exercises and new voice technology, dads could try out baby talk, learn about ECD and encourage other dads to try. The initiative spread quickly on social media and countless fathers participated and shared their results together with UNICEF’s important message.

With this interactive and shareable activation, UNICEF inspired fathers around the globe to break barriers and give their children a head start in life.

To reach our target group, fathers on a global market, who have small infants, we needed to find a clear and common cultural insight with enough emotional impact to break through the clutter and different cultural climates.

Moreover, our strategy was to clearly, throughout every aspect of the campaign, address this initiative to fathers, since they rarely are explicitly targeted for these kind of initiatives. By doing so, we also aimed to get a spillover effect on other caregivers.

We knew we had to stay clear form pointing fingers and guilt tripping. Our strategy was to create an interactive experience that could provide both learning and confidence. That’s why our communicative strategy was daring to be playful in our execution, so we could push this urgent subject in a positive and inviting way.

Our target group was fathers from all over the world, with infants. This meant we had to find a common denominator with enough emotional impact to break through many different cultural climates.

To reach our audience and get a spillover effect on other caregivers, our strategy was to very clearly, throughout every aspect of the campaign, address this initiative to fathers, since they rarely are so explicitly targeted for these kind of initiatives. The heart of the campaign was the course itself, which took 3 months to develop.

We worked closely with Dr Marina Kalashnikova, a renowned professor specialized in language development, to create the exercises and format. Simultaneously we worked on implementing these exercises into an interactive experience with new voice technology that could recognize the higher, dragged out pitch that is characteristic for baby talk. We packed the course into a playful, exclusive and user friendly narrative, tailored to help new fathers feel more comfortable using their baby talk voices, while learning more about much they can actually do to stimulate their child’s early learning from day one.

To spread the news of the course, we let dads from different countries try out baby talk. We captured their fun and moving reactions in an emotional film, that we launched on social media, Youtube and other key platforms where the audience spend time.

With an accessible site, fun interactive elements and an approach heavily fcused on a carefully crafted journey on social media, we created a full-scaled global activation, but with a digital experience that allowed for an intimate one-to one feeling, ensuring that as many fathers as possible could hear about the initiative, try it out and share it amongst each other.

Baby Talk For Dads proved to be a success and the results hugely surpassed the client’s objectives.

Reach:

A total media reach reported was 281 million impressions.

The campaign had visibility and mentions in 32 countries, exceeding our goals with more than 100%.

Engagement/Interactions:

Engagement on social channels was measured to be over 70 000 interactions, shares and comments, exceeding not only the objectives for this particular campaign, but also results from previous campaigns.