UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund): ANY REASON

Credits & Description:

Category: Charity and Not for Profit

Advertiser: UNICEF

Product/Service: CHILD MARRIAGE

Agency: RAPP

Chief Creative Officer: Rik Haslam (Rapp)

Design Director: Adrian Whatman (Rapp)

Art Director: Paul Turner (Rapp)

Copywriter: Robbie Rae (Rapp)

Media placement: Consumer PR - Grazia - 1st May 2011



Summary of the Campaign

We wanted to use the occasion of the royal wedding to bring the public’s attention to the issue of forced child marriage. UNICEF is arguably best known for its emergency appeals, so this campaign required us to re-position the charity in the public’s consciousness as a proactive, campaigning charity.



Our strategy for achieving this was essentially to ‘crash’ the wedding through a focused PR campaign targeting the day of the wedding, by subverting a number of the traditions of marriage ceremonies to further the charity’s message. So we had a number of commemorative plates made up and mailed to select journalists, but instead of featuring an image of William and Kate, the plates featured a very young bride and her elderly husband. The back of the plate featured the UNICEF logo along with a message to the journalists saying that ‘some weddings should not be celebrated’.



This campaign had a single-minded PR focus. Reach out to select journalists to make them aware of the issue of forced child marriage and enlist their support to ‘crash’ the day of the royal wedding by getting editorial coverage in their publications.



With an extremely limited budget we selected a very small group of journalists and mailed them a high impact piece of direct marketing designed to engage them with the issue and prompt their support in creating awareness through editorial.



The Situation

Forced child marriage is an issue largely overlooked by the British public and press. We saw an opportunity to use the public’s fascination with the royal wedding (and the press’s exploitation of that fascination) to start a discussion on a shocking and emotive issue – and remind people that not every wedding is cause for celebration. We also wanted to re-position UNICEF in people’s minds. The charity is best known for emergency appeals, and campaigns on a number of issues for children.



The Goal

As the pomp and pageantry of the royal wedding engulfed the nation, we wanted to bring people’s attention to the plight of young girls all over the world who are married off before their lives have properly begun. We also wanted to remind the audience that UNICEF is a campaigning charity, not just a source of emergency appeals.



The Strategy

For maximum impact, the campaign had to land as close to the date of the big wedding as possible. The commemorative plates were sent to journalists and MPs that very weekend, and most of the newspapers and magazines people opened that weekend contained a press ad, a press insert, or both.



Execution

The plan was simple and designed to have impact on a single day: make select journalists aware of the issue of forced child marriage and enlist their support to ‘crash’ the day of the royal wedding by gaining prominent editorial footage about the ‘forced marriages’ that are anything but a fairy-tale wedding.



With a very limited budget we had to be clever. We sent a small number of commemorative plates to journalists we’d identified as predisposed to ethical issues. Instead of featuring an image of William and Kate, the plates featured a very young bride and her elderly husband. A message on the reverse of the plate stated simply that 'some weddings should not be celebrated'.



Documented Results

2 of our targeted publications (The Guardian newspaper and Grazia magazine – the UK’s bestselling women’s magazine) both ran double page editorial articles featuring the issue of forced child marriage and specifically referenced the role of UNICEF in attempting to end this mediaeval practice.