In a world where conflict and natural disasters are consistently causing food insecurity the work of WFP is increasingly necessary.

Despite government support everyone with the ability to help will be required to, in order to reach a Zero Hunger world. We need each individual to care about hunger and WFP’s work enough to donate. Therefore our first goal became to make people care about hunger and show them how they can stop it.

In our world of wealth disparity there are 20x more smartphones than hungry children:- a tiny contribution everyday from each smartphone would ensure no child goes hungry.

WFP created a simple app - Share The Meal - to engage with those users.

WFP made it easy to donate, so it became our mission to build an awareness of WFP’s work, and emotionally engage the audience enough to convince them to use the app to help.

“The creative challenge was to find a way of engaging the audience without resorting to endless images of starving children. Instead, we created empathy by reminding the viewer that when a child dies, we all lose.”

On the mother of all screens for creative, cinema, the unnerving narrative depicts journalists scrabbling to interview the recipient of a breakthrough medical research award - Miriam. However Miriam tells journalists ‘there is no breakthrough’. She begins to fade as she reveals she died of hunger at age 8. Her voice, now that of a child, asks us to feed our future and download ‘Share The Meal’.

Building on this, a Facebook ‘Hackathon” at Cannes developed ideas for a full 360 campaign. Facebook created a chance to talk to a ‘Miriambot’, made more versions of lost potential stories, had celebrities talk about how incredible ‘Miriam’ is and streamed the ad live globally.

The key was to encourage people to see ‘hunger’ not as something that affects other people’s lives, in some other place. But to see hunger as a clear and present danger to all of us and to all our futures.

We wanted people to engage with the truth that WE ALL LOSE WHEN A CHILD’S POTENTIAL IS LOST. And that every time a child dies, OUR future dies with them.

Whether that future is a medical discovery, a scientific breakthrough, an innovative new service or product, a new artistic or cultural contribution. 3 million opportunities for bettering our world are lost every year. What a waste of human potential!

We needed to clearly illustrate the potential futures and better world we are losing when we lose a child.

With the offer of global cinema advertising space from SAWA members the core of ‘Feed our Future’ became a commercial film. Therefore we needed a team with a cinematic skillset in order to take advantage of the cinema environment. So we engaged Somesuch and their BAFTA award winning director Lynne Ramsay who created a truly stunning 70 second film.

The film would be translated into 19 languages and played in cinema commercial slots in 34 countries, boosted by digital screens in lobbies showing posters.

Inspired by this core we went onto build the messaging out. A partnership with Facebook allowed cinema-goers to scan a code on-screen to start ‘conversation’ with our ‘Miriam’ chatbot to find out more. Then the ad was streamed in Facebook Live’s across global cities, accompanied by discussion panels. We also had celebrities talk about ‘Miriam’ on their pages and Facebook ad’s showing stories of lost potential.

The first effect was total silence from the cinema audience “there was absolute silence in the audience when it ran”.

The emotional impact meant 1 in 5 remembered the ad one week later. Fuelling a 38% increase in downloads and 60% increase in revenue for STM in just a week of cinema. Awareness of WFP amongst moviegoers jumped 40% higher than non movie-goers.

On average 240 people a day were moved to talk with our ‘Miriambot’. In fact engagement with our Facebook collateral was an unprecedented 25% (Average Non-profit facebook engagement is 0.13%).

The Feed our Future campaign came together to raise over $500,000 USD. Enough to fund over 1 MILLION MEALS. ($0.50 global average cost for a days food through WFP)

Or put another way, 1 million children not going to bed hungry that night. 1 million children now with a tomorrow, now with a future.