Creativity allows children to develop resiliency, openness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. All of which are vital in helping them to reach their full potential. Yet 6 out of 10 parents don’t believe their kids engage in enough creative activity.

To launch Campaign for Creativity, our brief aimed to elicit an emotional connection, highlighting creativity’s important role in kids’ lives and inspiring parental support. Leveraging Crayola’s nostalgic appeal and its Dream-Maker's program, which began 40 years ago, we reunited adults with their childhood artwork, triggering an emotional realization about the power of creativity that would resonate far and wide. This powerful, sharable film showcased these reunions and sparked widespread discussion, laying the foundation for our broader campaign.

Our casting team was tasked with combing through the information of over 1,000 children that had submitted their work into the Dream Makers program nearly 40 years ago. With only their names, grade level and school to go by, the search proved especially challenging.

Many of these individuals had moved cities and/or married and changed their names, but the search was eventually narrowed down to 200 people who matched our qualifications. Out of these, we found Amanda, Barbara, and Justin. Each of them had an inspiring connection to their artwork, and loved ones who were able to track down and return their artwork to them. The latter part was conducted clandestinely as the three needed to be surprised by the return of their work. Through scouring decades of information we finally found our cast - one that beautifully shaped our story of the importance of creativity in all our lives.

Recently launched organically, “Stay Creative” has reached over 750k on YouTube – with views doubling in less than 24 hours. The story has generated 500 PR pickups nationwide with a potential reach of over 200+ million people. Stories have appeared in outlets as varied as Trend Hunter and The Toy Book. We’ve even inspired celebrities like John Krasinski to record videos of their own about creativity.

Most importantly, the message of our film is resonating and spreading. We’ve seen an engagement rate of over 10% with paid posts promoting the film on Meta and thousands of likes, share, and comments across Crayola owned channels - proving that Crayola continues to inspire creativity in us all.