We are failing the world’s youngest citizens. Almost half of all under-five children who died in 2016 were newborns. These deaths are completely unnecessary. More than 80% are caused by three preventable and treatable conditions: complications due to prematurity or during delivery, and infections like sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia. But treatment and interventions are not reaching the mothers and children who need them most - the families who live in the most disadvantaged areas, enduring the harshest conditions. UNICEF needed health ministers at the World Health Assembly to increase investment in quality healthcare for every mother and baby. Our objectives were to attract global public attention to the issue via social media, and drive petition signatures that would be handed to Ministers at the Assembly.

Protecting babies is our most basic human instinct. So why are we not doing more to protect the newborns who really need our help, around the world? UNICEF raised this question by creating created a petition to World Health Ministers that was impossible to ignore. It lay next to a crying newborn baby that was seemingly alone and abandoned on the streets of Geneva, where world leaders were gathering for the World Health Assembly. The stark message on the petition read: why aren’t we stopping to help the 7,000 newborns who die every day?

We needed to reach global decision makers attending the World Health Assembly and the public at large, to move the issue of infant mortality the agenda. To do that, we would stage a socially shareable stunt at the very place they were gathering – the streets of Geneva. The event would need to be provocative and highly emotional to properly engage viewers on social channels to sign an online petition which would be delivered to decision makers at the Assembly. This petition would call upon world leaders to invest in quality healthcare for every mother and child, through a series of important programmes and initiatives around the world.

Partnering with a robotics company and multi-award-winning special effects artists, we developed a hyper-realistic animatronic newborn which looked, moved and cried just like a real newborn. Crew and the technicians who controlled the animatronic were out of shot, while we captured the public's reactions. Next to our baby was a message 'why aren't we stopping to help the 7000 newborns who die every day?' with a petition to sign that called upon world leaders to invest in quality healthcare for every mother and child, through a series of important programmes around the world. The Most Human Instinct social experiment took place during the World Health Assembly (21st – 26th May 2018) and aired on UNICEF’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter channels. The film pointed viewers towards an online petition, where members of the public could call on world leaders to provide affordable, quality health care for every mother and newborn.

The Most Human Instinct was viewed over 12 million times across social channels, quickly became the most viewed and liked UNICEF Instagram post of all time and the first one to achieve over 100K likes. With £zero spent on paid media, the film received over 2.2 million views on Instagram with more than 200,000 likes - and over 8.8 million on Facebook (90% organic), with more than 700,000 reactions. The Facebook video link had the highest conversion rate 67% of people who landed on the #EveryChildAlive microsite went on to sign the petition. Most vitally, the campaign resulted in over 150,000 signatures of the petition which were delivered to global decision makers at the World Health Assembly. Since then, governments have agreed to invest in life-saving programs for mums and babies.