Brief Explanation

The South Korean youth’s happiness index has been the lowest among the OECD for 6 years. Actually, school violence is a major cause of this low happiness index. According to survey, 45% of students who experienced school violence have considered suicide. It seems that school violence has a serious influence on the SouthKorean youth’s happiness. Beneath these numbers, there lies a bigger problem. 52.6% of students responded that they had witnessed a friend being bullied, but just ignored it. As a solution, we focused on the bystanders. We wanted to help students protect their bullied friends, instead of ignoring them.

Results and Effectiveness

During the campaign, 106 calls were made that led to teacher-student counseling sessions. Moreover, no bullying occurred despite the high expected rate of bullying. This result is inspiring, considering the fact that the annual average of bullying occurrences was 8.5 during the past 6 years. Nametag itself is a media, but there are huge media expanding to the whole city. Our client - the Seoul Metropolitan Government - is showing the campaign film through 100 billboards, 1035 screens of public transportation, and screens in 25 district offices to promote the anti-bullying policy, and considering expanding the campaign to other schools.

Creative Execution

This campaign was launched on March 9, 2015, when “Friends NameTags” were distributed to 298 first-graders at Chungam Middle School. Besides encouraging students to become friends, the “Friends NameTag” had 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 pushes a 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.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

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.