We knew that telling children what to do wouldn’t work, so we had to get them to engage with the issue in a way that would change behaviour. We needed a medium that was popular with our age group, flexible enough to allow for highly interactive communications and cheap enough to have a large proportion of children to engage with it. Creating digital content was the perfect answer. We thus created an online game called Yoobot through which all the learning could take place.Yoobot could not expect instant credibility; it wasn’t a recognised game from a known manufacturer. So we deployed complimentary media to engage with kids on their terms, and placed it in those areas which they considered their world. We used advertising in a way more akin to video games than a standard childhood obesity campaign, by show-casing the game features.

We deployed complimentary media to engage with kids on their terms, and placed it in areas which they considered their world. We used advertising in a way more akin to video games than a standard childhood obesity campaign, by show-casing the game features.We partnered with Nickelodeon’s CSR program to make TV ads announcing the launch of the game. This partnership helped subsidise our TV ads allowing us to stretch the budget further. These were followed up with in-school posters and one million DM packs in the style of game instruction manuals, these were left on kid’s school desks. These were all designed to be refreshingly un-single-minded in order to drive word of mouth amongst our target. Further digital media was used to drive traffic to the site directly. This included online display advertising, paid for search and seeding on the games sites where children were already looking to play and entertain themselves.

Yoobot was the 3rd fastest growing UK search term at launch (Britney Spears was 4th).Average site visit was over 9 minutes with 3 visits per user compared to typically cited advergaming engagement of 3-4 minutes.If Yoobot were a commercial game it would have joined the elite group of 11 games that have achieved diamond status (selling 1 million units in the UK).Yoobot made diet an immediate relevancy an effect not seen in previous BHF campaigns78% of children who played Yoobot claimed to be eating better – 15% increase in eating healthy cereal, 14% decrease in unhealthy cereals.