The Brief

There are a lot of education systems to stop school violence in Korea, but these systems are not enough. The best solution to prevent school violence is to make students become true friends. However, 52.6% of students answered that they have witnessed a friend being bullied, but didn’t do anything about it. So we focused on these bystanders. If we only helped them actively look out for their friends, school violence would occur much less. All we needed to do was give them a little help to protect their friends. That’s why we made students’ name tags more special.

Creative Execution

This campaign was launched on March 9, 2015, when the “Friends Name Tags” were distributed to 298 first-graders at Chungam Middle School. Besides encouraging students to become friends, the “Friends Name Tag” has one more function. With an embedded emergency alarm system, students who see friends being bullied can easily help them, instead of ignoring them. When a student presses the button on the name tag, teachers are notified right away through computers and wearable devices. To prevent secondary harm, every piece of information is processed and converted to unique IDs, so that only the teachers can recognize where the call came from. The data of all the “Friends Name Tag” calls made is saved onto a server and is being used for more effective counseling.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

The highest occurrence of school violence was found among middle school students, with 73.8% of all the occurrences. In particular, 30% of all school violence occurred in March and April, when the new semester begins and social hierarchy starts to form among students. Therefore, the right time to solve this issue should be at the beginning of a new semester. To make students not become bystanders, we created the “Friends NameTag”, a special name tag with two names on it: the owner’s name, and another friend’s name. With this name tag, students are encouraged to become friends regardless of hierarchy.

Results

The “Friends Name Tag” gave students an opportunity to get to know each other, and provided an easy way to look out for them, too. During the campaign period, a total of 106 calls were made, and teacher-student counseling took place. Moreover, no bullying occurred during the campaign despite the high expected rate of school violence. This result is inspiring, considering the fact that the annual average of bullying occurrences was 8.5 during the past 6 years. Chungam Middle School is using the “Friends Name Tag” as a useful item for education programs reinforcing friendship. Inspired by this success, our client – the Seoul Metropolitan Government – is showing the campaign film to promote anti-bullying policy with 100 billboards, 1035 screens of public transportations, and official screens of 25 district offices. Moreover, the campaign is being considered to expand to other schools.