Hunger is Invisible.
Non-profit / Multimedia
Copywriter: Michael Wellvang
Art Director: Jonah Wang
No Kid Hungry is a national campaign run by Share Our Strength, a national organization working to end childhood hunger and poverty in the United States. For our coursework in advertising school, we wanted to tackle creating a multifaceted campaign that would attempt to reach people in their daily lives.
Background & Thought Process
When Americans think about child hunger, they tend to picture distant countries with starving children: issues far removed from the worries of a first world country like the United States.
However, the truth is that inconsistent access to food (food insecurity) and malnutrition are widespread problems for children in America as well, they just may not be as readily-apparent.
Prong 1: Social Media
Nearly 1 in 7 children in America struggle with access to regular meals. From an outside perspective they may look and act the same as everybody else, however for some kids, school lunch is the only consistent meal they may get. Contrary to popular belief, children who appear obese may even be the ones experiencing issues with food access. Due to the rampant and rising costs of goods in general, many families fill their stomachs with fast food, as it is both available and cheap, which leads to malnutrition.
We wanted to draw attention to the fact that this issue is something that may be difficult to identify just by looking, and utilized a photo carousel on Instagram to highlight that the children that look overweight may actually be the ones who need help getting access to healthy meals.
Prong 2: In-store Stunt
The second idea we had was to raise more awareness in locations specifically centered around buying food and daily commodities. To play on the idea that this is an issue that lies beneath the surface, we proposed that one method to catch peoples’ attention was to place our awareness message on the bottom of the plates, cups and bowls that people use for free samples at grocery stores. Everybody, loves free samples and once they finish their snack there would be a visible call to action and statistic about child hunger for them to think about.