THE WORLD'S SHORTEST SELF HELP BOOK

TitleTHE WORLD'S SHORTEST SELF HELP BOOK
BrandCHILDREN'S WELFARE DENMARK
Product/ServicePARENT COUNSELING
Category A06. Not-for-profit / Charity / Government
Entrant PONG Copenhagen, DENMARK
Idea Creation PONG Copenhagen, DENMARK
Production PONG Copenhagen, DENMARK
Credits
Name Company Position
Rasmus Zepernick PONG Creative
Mikkel Elung PONG Creative
Mette Hørdum PONG Strategy

Why is this work relevant for Media?

The idea is to use self-help books as a media and a shortcut to get parents with young children's attention.

Background

Studies show that 4 out of 10 look at their phone while they are together with their children. This destroys the contact between child and parent and makes especially young children unsafe - and can lead to anxiety and depression later in life. In the last 10 years Denmark has seen a dramatic rise in the number of children with anxiety and depression. The objective of this campaign was to create awareness amongst parents with young children and to change their behavior, so they would connect with their children instead of their phones.

Describe the creative idea / insights (30% of vote)

Parents with young children has many questions about their children, because everything is new. And there are hundreds of self-help books available with advice on everything from good sleeping habits to child-friendly food and how to handle conflicts with your child. Actually there are so many books and advices that parents get a bit confused. So when we wanted to change parents behavior we developed "The world's shortest self-help book". It only had 1 advice: Put down you phone! But why did we need to publish a whole book to make that point? Because the book had a hole in the middle, where parents could place their phone and close the cover. Problem solved. And the beautiful part is that this book is placed in the child's room, so every time parents are in there, they are reminded to put the phone away.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

The strategy was to place our message in a medium that parents with young children by their own free will look to (and buy) to get advice on how to raise their children. These self-help books are extremely popular and a credible source of information. By using this book as our primary medium we found a shortcut to our target group.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

We designed the book to look like a regular self-help book in quality hard copy materials and got a well known illustrator to decorate it with emotional child-like illustrations. At first glance these illustrations look like normal children book illustrations, but when you look closer you can see that phones are subtly present in the illustrations. All design choices are made to make the book look as "typical" as possible, so that the reader at first glance will believe that this is a normal self-help book. The book was launched like a regular book-launch with press coverage and reviews. Due to the severity of the problem, Children's Welfare Denmark spend 20% of their yearly campaign budget on this single book publication alone.

List the results (30% of vote)

The campaign was launched in October, so results on behavioral changes are not in yet. Put the book got overwhelmingly good PR and spread quickly amongst influencers (who are particular dependent of their phone due to their work). And only 1 hour after the launch of the book, there was already a waiting list to get it.