Thousands of gambling houses are placed in the immediate proximity of schools and kids are overexposed to gambling ads. According to Save the Children research, most kids have noticed gambling ads, and 1 in 4 has engaged in real money gambling.

Save the Children wanted to take a stand against the vicious industry and advocate for stricter legal restrictions and advertisement regulations. This was going to be an asymmetrical battle against a spender accounting for over 5% of the Romanian media market, politically connected and riding a social trend.

With our very limited assets we needed to trigger an alternate conversation – not through reach and frequency, but by giving a wake-up call to all parents and decision makers out there, who despite caring for children were unknowingly abandoning them to the opportunistic gambling industry.

Kids are unbeatable at two things: challenging rules and speaking the naked truth. We did both.

We removed the child figure from the Save the Children logo, turning it into an empty plate emoji which gave hunger a new meaning: Hunger for Money. Then we used it to mark the touchpoints where gambling and children met, starting with gambling venues placed in the proximity of schools.

We counted on our emoji being visually striking during these engagements, to signal the terrible mismatch we had all accepted. A strange and disruptive companion to the upbeat, worry-free gambling ads.

We aimed to reveal children’s dangerous exposure to gambling, bringing school authorities, activists and policy makers on our side. The Hunger for Money emoji served as an attention magnet which needed to be placed at the right places. Such touchpoints included:

- gambling establishments in schools’ proximity

- content creators who promoted gambling to minors

- digital outdoor gambling ads

- gambling advertising during football games, at times when gambling ads were banned on TV, but still visible in the football field during broadcast

- schools themselves

With a very limited budget, we needed to count on the media vendors’ moral compass – which significantly reduced options and disrupted media planning. Rather than look for suppliers to implement a plan, we continuously rethought our approach around the touchpoints above, with the intersection between gambling and children serving as our North Star.

We started by checking the outdoor inventory around gambling houses. 7 of the 10 major vendors turned us down instantly, fearing loss of business. Others asked for reassurance about Save the Children as the brand behind the campaign – a name which inspired trust. Significant effort was needed to negotiate several placements on gambling buildings.

Another 46 placements were secured on digital outdoor formats, in high-schools and during two football matches on the biggest stadium in Romania. Together, these accounted for over 17 million contacts, with most exposure coming from football, and an estimated reach of over 800,000. 

Online, we enabled people to mark celebrities who promoted gambling to minors with the Hunger for Money emoji. Millions of empty plates were left in comments.

With support from schools, we brought hundreds of children in the streets, hand in hand measuring the distance between their schools and the nearest gambling houses.

Since the end of 2023, things have changed for the better.

While we were live, one of the “marked” gambling houses was temporarily closed. Another gambling brand removed its ads, which competed with our nearby emoji.

Bombed with millions of emojis, some influencers apologized for promoting gambling and donated their earnings to NGOs. Others publicly denied any association to the industry.

Gambling banners larger than 35 sqm were taken down by law. For good.

Our story was picked up in digital media, social, TV and radio news. Including outdoor placements, we achieved 674,000 Euro in earned media.

A law was recently passed to completely ban gambling houses in small cities and all rural areas – that’s over 90% of all the localities in Romania. It’s not ideal, as bigger cities remain exposed. But it’s a start, an achievement beyond our initial hopes, to which many voices in civil society contributed.