Meant to gain financial and political support for the organization’s efforts to reduce child mortality, the campaign — called “Every Beat Matters” — was created by the New York office of the BBDO ad agency, part of the Omnicom Group, for Save the Children and the Advertising Council. OneRepublic’s song, called “Feel Again,” was released in August on iTunes and will be featured on the group’s album, “Native,” to be released in March.
The campaign is BBDO’s second for Save the Children, based in Westport, Conn., and the Ad Council; its first was introduced in 2010. Both campaigns were created to support the newborn and child survival efforts, primarily overseas, of Save the Children. According to Unicef data, about seven million children a year die before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable and treatable causes like pneumonia, diarrhea and neonatal complications. Newborns account for 40 percent of those deaths.
David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America, said that when the agency began working with Save the Children, it decided to use the organization’s “unheralded” health workers to illustrate its aid efforts. The first campaign depicted actual workers in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, walking to work in rural villages and examining children.
The new campaign came about, Mr. Lubars said, when BBDO discovered a new type of stethoscope that lets the user listen to and record a patient’s heartbeat. It hired the documentary makers Sean and Andrea Fine, who have worked in Uganda and India, to film a local health worker, trained by Save the Children, in a rural village in Malawi.
The Fines’s 90-second television spot opens with the health worker, Chisomo Boxer, preparing for work and waiting on his bicycle on a dirt road. It then shows an airplane flying over rural Africa, carrying a box that is unloaded from the plane and delivered to Mr. Boxer. He enters the village, surrounded by children, and opens the box, which contains a special stethoscope. He uses it to listen to and record the children’s heartbeats and to assess their health.
The second half of the spot shows the Denver recording studio of OneRepublic. The group’s lead singer, Ryan Tedder, plugs a cable into the stethoscope, listens to the heartbeats of the children from Malawi and composes a song incorporating them. OneRepublic is then shown recording the song.
The ad concludes with Mr. Boxer riding his bicycle in Malawi with the stethoscope strapped to it, the village children running behind him. “Feel Again” is played, and a voice-over says: “This song was created with heartbeats of children in need. Find out how it can help front-line health workers bring hope to millions of children at EveryBeatMatters.org,” a Web site that BBDO created for the campaign.
BBDO also designed three print ads, each a “heartbeat portrait” of a different aid worker, one of whom is Mr. Boxer. Each portrait is made up of dozens of real electrocardiogram images; the name of each child whose electrocardiogram is shown is printed in tiny type to the left of the image.
The copy on Mr. Boxer’s ad says: “Actual heartbeats from the children Chisomo saved in Malawi created this portrait of him. Help front-line health workers like Chisomo bring hope to millions of children at EveryBeatMatters.org.”
The campaign also includes Web banners that employ Mr. Boxer’s “heartbeat portrait,” radio spots featuring Mr. Tedder, outdoor ads and Facebook and Twitter initiatives encouraging people to download OneRepublic’s song.
In addition, BBDO created an interactive kiosk that lets users plug their headphones into stethoscopes to listen to a child’s heartbeat, “Feel Again” and a message from Mr. Tedder. The kiosk was on display last month at the One Club in New York, and the Ad Council is arranging new sites for it this year.
Mr. Tedder said all the proceeds — both to the band and to its record label, Interscope — from the first 750,000 downloads of the song on iTunes would go to Save the Children. According to Peggy Conlon, president and chief executive of the Ad Council, the song has been downloaded more than 600,000 times so far.
Mr. Tedder, who has a young son, went to Guatemala after he wrote “Feel Again” to see firsthand how children lived there. “In many cases, the only thing that keeps these kids alive is these front-line health workers trained by Save the Children,” he said.
The campaign’s Web site was introduced in August, and the Ad Council began distributing its ads in September. “The goal of the campaign is to create awareness and raise money,” Mr. Lubars, the BBDO North America chairman, said. “We wanted to make it very personal, not negative, uplifting.”
Ms. Conlon said the intended audience for the campaign was “people who care about international childhood mortality, who are likely to be more involved with charitable work.” She added that it was the first time the Ad Council had relied heavily on the contributions of a pop music group in the creation of a campaign.
Mary Beth Powers, chief of Save the Children’s newborn and child survival campaign, said Mr. Tedder’s involvement “certainly brings new, younger audiences to the issue of child survival.”
She also said Save the Children hoped the new campaign would inspire Americans to tell elected officials that “they can’t balance the budget” — which has in the past contained financing for foreign aid programs — “on the backs of women and children globally.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/business/media/save-the-children-uses-onerepublic-in-child-mortality-campaign.html?partner=rss&emc=rss