People still struggle to properly care for their teeth. 90% of oral care problems are preventable by adopting regular brushing twice a day: in the morning and before bedtime. However, getting kids to brush their teeth can be tricky.

Signal wanted to find a way to teach children how to take better care of their teeth. The main goal was to create an engaging, playful, educational digital experience that makes brushing teeth an integral part of a child's daily oral care routine.

We have taken the existing fun web content of Little Brush Big Brush series and came up with an interactive AR game that would actually change kids' habits.

By motivating kids to brush twice a day, regularly for 21 days, the digital experience aims to promote lifelong behavioural change by teaching them the importance of brushing their teeth.

We cleaned and gleamed up Signal’s toothbrushing companion with a creative AR overhaul.

Building on the existing Little Brush Big Brush webseries, the Facebook Messenger experience expands the story with an encouraging chatbot offering 5 fun-filled crafted to perfection animal masks that teach kids how to care for their teeth.

The experience keeps kids brushing for 21 days through daily reminders, colourful AR interactions and specially designed reward stickers — helping them form a positive habit in a playful way. As one of the first Messenger extensions to use augmented reality for learning, the experience shows there’s so much more to AR than puking rainbows.

The Signal Little Brush Big Brush webseries was the basis for our AR experience. We have taken this content a step further through use of Facebook Messenger as a commonly used, natural channel to engage Signal users.

In the 21-day entertaining educational program for parents and kids, we invited them to join a bespoke AR-based journey on their smartphones explain the task and its benefits.

To ensure the experience was relevant and timely, the chatbot loads at your designated brushing time, where kids could choose fun masks to “become” during their brushing. To ensure engagement, kids receive sticker awards for being a good brusher.

We created the 5 augmented masks using Facebook's proprietary software: Spark AR

At the time, Spark AR wasn't created for such complex and long experiences, so we had to overcome technical limitations and requirements to come to our final product.

As simply using masks wouldn’t be enough of a game, we took to the stickerbooks we all know from our own childhood, created a digital version and turned it into the motivating manifestation of our challenge across the 21 days. To bring the Stickerbook to life, we used an HTML/CSS page that keeps track of the progress and rewards of the user. This is where the stickers they receive for adequate brushing are 'stored',shown and shared.

The challenge we faced for the Stickerbook was optimisation, as we used one long image as well as 27 animated stickers & sounds that needed to load immediately. We used a vector-based animation technique called BodyMovin to avoid using heavy gifs and keep the file-size low—all increasing speed and smoothness.

Using characters and storylines the children already knew from the webseries was important for us. This made it easy for children who already knew the characters to dive straight into the experience.

We wanted to find the right balance in animal/human features to be starred in the masks, to get them just right. A challenge, but when we tested the experience on children, their reaction showed us it was a job well done.

We managed to leverage the technology of Spark AR and the Facebook Messenger platform to turn an everyday chore into a fun and joyful experience that puts a smile—and an augmented animal—on your kids face!

The project took 5 months to create and has so far launched in France, Vietnam and Indonesia.

With Little Brush Big Brush AR Experience, Signal has created a playful way to teach children how to develop a healthy dental hygiene routine. The 21-day approach— exactly the time it takes for children to form a habit— facilitates this positive development. The AR experience is in its initial stages, but we already see growing engagement. In June this year the campaign will reach its second stage when we activate the chatbots and add more AR lenses. So far we grew organically, the coming campaign will include the first media spend for the project.