Background

New Zealand has one of the highest child poverty rates in the OCED, making accessing enough food to feed the family, a daily challenge for many Kiwis. KidsCan is a charity that was set up to feed children living in hardship. But with thousands of kids waiting for their help, they were in need of help themselves. The purpose of this campaign was to raise donations so that KidsCan could feed more disadvantaged New Zealand children. We needed the campaign to have a big impact for very little media spend. So we made a series of ads that Kiwis would find themselves. A campaign that stopped people in their tracks, while they're trying to decide what to put on their own plates and inspired them to fill someone else's instead.

Describe the strategy

NZ may have one of the highest food insecurity rates, but we are also a nation of foodies. Some of our most loved celebrities and social media influencers are chefs, our most popular google searches and hashtags are for recipes and food, and one of our favorite pastimes is cooking. So, we targeted the 'haves' by showing them what 'families in need' would be eating - right when they were deciding what to cook for their own families. First, we sourced a series of heartbreaking recipes from real families living in poverty. Then we teamed up with four of New Zealand’s top celebrity chefs and cooking influencers to bring the recipes to life in a series of cooking videos, printed recipes and recipe boxes. Finally, we placed our recipes in all the places New Zealanders look for theirs.

Describe the execution

All four videos were created in the same cooking show style you would expect to see from our four famous chefs. Then placed everywhere you would expect to see one of their other cooking videos - from the chef's own social channels through to Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, google search, foodie websites, blogs, facebook pages and magazines. By placing our content everywhere Kiwi's were looking for recipes, we managed to take over all of NZ's most popular cooking and food-related content channels with very minimal media spend. Through the use of relevant popular search words and hashtags the videos popped up whenever and wherever Kiwis looked for cooking inspiration, inspiring them to donate to KidsCan instead. The print ads ran in the recipe sections of popular NZ lifestyle magazines and the recipe boxes were used out to get the attention of the social media influencers and the media.

List the results

The campaign reached over 2.2 million people (in a country with a population of only 4.9 million) and raise enough donations for more than 200,000 meals.