The Adventures of Little Brush Big Brush: a 21 episode interactive cartoon that follows a child (Little Brush) and their parent (Big Brush) on their exciting journey around the world, as they try to get back home.

Brushing is fundamental to the entire narrative. To progress, kids and parents had to perform a brushing challenge issued by each character. For instance, when they meet a skiing moose in Norway, they must perform the “ski brush”, brushing their teeth with their body in a position like they’re skiing! Once completed, they can progress to the next episode.

Every night a new adventure is sent to the parent’s phone; a Facebook Messenger experience for smartphone users and a lighter SMS experience for feature phone users. This way, parents could watch the episodes with their kids exactly when and where they wanted to: in the bathroom, right before bedtime.

To create a world kids could fall in love with, we adopted the ‘Voyage and Return’ plot structure that’s proven to resonate. To keep families engaged, we chose locations that were radically different from one night to the next, but which still adhered to a genuine path they could trace across a map. This educative angle was so important that every animal character which family’s meet in the story is a genuine indigenous species. Each has their own backstory to give depth and substance. We workshopped their accents and personalities which is evident in the cartoons, but also in the way they ‘speak’ in Messenger. Sound was carefully designed to breathe life into the universe we were creating. And if all this wasn’t already enough to keep kids engaged, we even hid visual ‘Easter Eggs’ so children had a reason to rewatch, which in turn reinforced the desired behaviour change.

It’s still an early stage in our journey, but the numbers are very promising.

The average session duration is 4 minutes for feature phone episodes, which means that users are playing the episodes and the brushing exercises in their entirety. We have over 300,000 registered for the messenger programme across both mobile and feature phone. So far, these users have played 240,600 episodes across the two versions.

And the adventures of Little Brush and Big Brush have just begun: Schools around the world are picking up our idea, and a Little Brush Big Brush curriculum scheme for over 7 million children is in development. We’re also moving beyond Facebook by teaming up with connected toothbrush company Playbrush to create two Little Brush Big Brush games.

The audience: kids and families. For many kids, brushing their teeth is the single worst thing that happens to them every night. Why? We dug a little deeper. It turned out that kids associate brushing with bedtime, something they want to avoid at all costs – even getting them into the bathroom at night is a challenge.

You’ll find the perfect weapon to overcome this in the backseat of cars around the world. Phones loaded with episodes of Peppa Pig, Club Penguin and Caillou. These experiences are magic for children and a saviour for parents.

Additionally, in conversations with a child behavioural psychologist, it was clear that children can be the most powerful agent of change for their parents.

Our strategy: Use the magic of animated storytelling to get kids brushing their teeth – and let them act as role models for their parents.

Signal’s social mission is to get families around the world to brush their teeth twice a day: once in the morning, once in the evening. Brushing twice a day, especially at night, has a huge impact on people’s oral health.

But in many countries, a high percentage of people only brushes once a day. For example, 93% in Bangladesh, 83% in India, 38% in the UK or 35% in France. Changing the behaviour of all these people is a huge mission, so Signal decided to start with an audience where we could affect the most change: kids.

Signal believes that ‘kids can change the world’ and wanted to encourage them to not only improve their own oral care, but also set a positive example for their parents. It also made sense from a business standpoint: promoting healthy oral care habits would increase the overall frequency of use of Signal products.