First 5 California
Empowering parents of preschoolers with tools for success
Integrated Campaign | Experiential Design | Video
Supporting new parents and inspiring them to “Talk. Read. Sing.” with their babies from the moment they’re born.
Since 1998, First 5 California has worked to improve the lives of children and families throughout the state, with the goal that children receive the best possible start in life. This is accomplished through an integrated system of education, health services, and early childhood development programs.
Research shows that 90% of a baby’s brain growth occurs by age 5 making those years a crucial time to foster brain development. Providing consistent, language-rich experiences – such as talking, reading, and singing – have important benefits on brain development and future school success.
However, many families lack access to the types of resources that can help them make the most of these language building experiences. This creates a gap in the quantity and quality of words that children learn, which directly impacts their opportunities to succeed in school and later on in life.
It was hard for audiences to grasp the impact, especially in economically disadvantaged, and multilingual communities. The advertising agency, Fraser Communications, where I served as Senior Art Director, was called upon to find a simple, memorable way to communicate the importance of engaging in activities for brain development with babies from the moment they are born.
Objective
Create a 360 campaign including tv, social, digital, print, web and experiential that empowers parents and caregivers to engage with their children from the moment they’re born. Efforts needed to focus on lower-income families ($75k annual HHI and less) with children ages 0-5 in California, with special emphasis on mothers, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and hard-to-reach communities.
MY ROLE
Senior Art Director
CREDITS
Fraser Communications, Agency
Bruce Dundore, Creative Director
James Kevich, Art Director
Talk. Read. Sing.®
It changes everything
We isolated three basic activities that all parents were already engaged in or familiar with: Talk. Read. Sing. To increase memorability, we created the Three Brainy Birds characters, then turned Talk. Read. Sing. into a song. Words that rhyme and are set to song are remembered better by children and adults alike. So to increase recall of the website, one of our birds sang the URL.
Three Brainy Birds Were Born
The Brainy Birds property extended to multiple platforms, including a children’s book, and across Spanish, Mixtec, Zapotec, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hmong and Russian languages. We created TV, video, digital, outdoor, toolkits, puppets, and in-community communications. My role was overseeing the team of designers, providing guidance and feedback to keep everything on brand, as well as designing much of the collateral myself.
First 5 Express
My work started on this campaign by revamping the experiential design of the First 5 Express – a traveling interactive exhibit that toured for almost a decade across California engaging with over 200,000 parents, caregivers, and young children, and distributed over 583,000 free resources to families.
When I joined the team, the branding was uninspired. My goal was to capture a child’s imagination coming to life and bursting with color at the sound of their parents reading them a book or singing a song. The aesthetic was fun and vibrant to appeal to kids but also informative for parents. I designed everything from pop-up banners, magnets and tote bags to maracas and books.
Outdoor
Digital
Website
The Fraser team partnered with SunnyByte to rebrand and develop a new website with over 40 pages. I had a small role designing some UI elements for the site.
Results
According to research done by a leading University, this is the most successful public service effort in the history of such efforts and has positively changed behaviors in California parents.
Created an 87% awareness in California parents
Over 250,000 social media followers and 85,000 -150,000 hits to their website every month
Distributed 427,000 free resources to families
75% of parents reported talking, reading and singing to their children as a result of the campaign