The camera opens on a young boy’s face. The hand—all we can see of a second person—is putting makeup over the lad’s chicken pox marks to conceal them.
"Am I gonna get in trouble?" asks the boy.
"No, you’re not gonna get in trouble," a girl’s voice responds.
"Are you sure?" persists the boy.
The girl—his older sister—is then seen on camera. She’s standing in front of the boy, who is seated on the counter next to the bathroom sink.
"They’re not even gonna know," she reassures him.
"But I can’t go to school if I’m sick," he points out.
"Just go to school so you can get some lunch. Then you can come home afterwards," the sister patiently explains.
Supered over them a sobering message reads, "1 out of every 5 children in the U.S. lives with hunger."
Then a slogan appears, supered against a black background: "The Sooner You Believe It, The Sooner We Can End It."
A toll-free number (1-800-Feedkids) and Web site address (www.feedingchildrenbetter.org) come on screen, along with the logos of the Ad Council, domestic hunger-relief organization America’s Second Harvest, and the ConAgra Feeding Children Better Foundation.
Titled "Chicken Pox," the PSA is part of a campaign directed and shot by Joe Pytka of Venice, Calif.-based PYTKA for Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), New York. Each spot recreates a true story. The ads depict the desperate lengths to which many American families have to go in order to feed themselves. A second spot, for example, shows a meager meal being prepared for a table of hungry children. The camera then reveals that the older girl, who has made the meal, does not even eat it; instead, she’s divided her portion among her siblings. In another PSA, a child runs to drink milk from a bowl that has been left for a cat on a neighbor’s front porch. And a final scenario shows a woman pocketing numerous packets of ketchup from several fast-food restaurants. She then goes home to prepare ketchup soup for her kids.
"In order for people to believe that childhood hunger exists, we needed to educate and define what child hunger really looks like and means in the U.S.," said Thomas Hayo, group creative director, BBH New York. "The scenarios we used in the ads are dramatizations of true stories we heard at shelters and food banks, and we realized that the best way to enlighten the public was with the shocking truth."
Peggy Conlon, president and CEO of the Ad Council, related: "Most people consider the issue of hunger to be a foreign one, and not something that really happens here. But the truth is that right now in America, there are twelve million kids going hungry. We must raise the public’s awareness of the situation. Considering the edginess of the campaign’s creative, I think it’s a message that the media will really get behind."
The BBH team on "Chicken Pox" consisted of creative director Hayo, copywriter Peter Kain, art director Gianfranco Arena and producer Mary Cheney. Hayo was creative director on the overall campaign, and Cheney produced all the spots for the agency.
Kathy Rhodes executive produced for PYTKA. Line producer was Leslie Vaughn.
Adam Liebowitz and Matt Silver of Go Robot!, New York, edited "Chicken Pox." Alisa Sheinberg was the executive producer and Jonlyn Williams the producer for the firm. Chris Ryan and Rich Schreck of New York-based Nice Shoes served as colorist and online editor, respectively. Audio mixer was Rob Sayers of Sound Lounge, New York.
