My First Book Project

The My First Book Project is a public awareness campaign created by JWT, Cape Town for Project Literacy (South Africa).

Coloribus has more information on this campaign :

Describe the brief from the client:
Developing nations face a literacy crisis. Only 20% of schools have books and children literally don’t have the books to learn from. We wanted to do something to help. We wanted to get first learner reader books into the hands of these kids.
The target audience was two fold: People in our advertising network, and underprivileged children in developing countries.
Our strategy was to show and inspire people that by transforming a piece of waste; they could transform the life of a child.

Creative Execution:
The execution was upbeat, hand-made and positive. And the idea was so simple; the best kind. So simple you could kick yourself. After all, those piles of stock books have been sitting around for ages, with no use, with all those pictures, just waiting for words. A truly obvious, original idea.
It is appropriate for the brand because it is honest and positive and relies on human goodness and charity. It is also fun, because let’s face it; everyone secretly wants to write a book.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.
Why not transform piles of defunct stock images books cluttering up ad agencies into first-learner reader books.
We created a viral film and mailed it to 200 offices in our global advertising network. We wanted to create a sustainable source of recycled education material that could be sent to places that needed it.
Our desired outcome was to receive any number of My First Books from recipients of our mail. We had no real projected response rate, and were relying on the inspiring nature of direct mail recycling idea and the simple direct digital video to inspire colleagues to contribute.
Describe the results in as much detail as possible.
We sent the mail to our entire network, approximately 10 000 individuals. 3072 of them responded by physically creating a My First Book (30.72% response rate). Every book adhered to deliverables expressed in the mail. The idea, based on recycling an existing resource, allowed the sales cost per response to be zero.
Relationships were formed between a global advertising network and employees and The World Literacy Foundation and underprivileged children it aims to assist.
Return on investment was vast. The cost of the in-house video compared to education value added to the lives of over 90 000 children, is immeasurable.

You can watch the video by clicking on the image above or visiting this page.