VERB YELLOWBALL

Background

The US is faced with the worst epidemic the country has ever seen: childhood obesity. In the last 20 years, the percentage of young people who are overweight has doubled. One in five kids is overweight. 70% of them will become overweight adults.

Five years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention challenged Frankel, an Arc Worldwide company, to help them turn this epidemic around. They created VERB - a brand and a campaign dedicated to inspiring play and passing it along to every tween in America.

Idea

VERB YELLOWBALL is the most recent effort in this ongoing campaign.

The idea is simple. They put hundreds of thousands (more than 500,000 to date) of yellow balls out into the world and encouraged kids to find them, play with them, then pass them on to other kids. Each ball has a unique code number and instructions that send kids to a microsite (www.verbnow.com/yellowball) where they can enter the code and blog what they did with the ball. This code also allows them to see who had the ball before them - then continue to track their ball once they’ve passed it on. On the microsite kids can tell their stories, meet celebrities that touched the ball, enter contests, and even earn iTunes for passing the ball along. Kids waiting to receive a ball can mix their own YELLOWBALL video, then pass it on to friends.

The campaign launched last November with an ‘influencer kit’ mailed to 1,000 teens and tweens, encouraging them to distribute balls to peers, blog on ‘friendship’ sites, and promote the programme through instant messaging. To create intrigue around the campaign, interactive projections were also placed in malls and movie theatres. Projected onto floors, kids could kick, hit and pass YELLOWBALL in a virtual game. In spring this year, 120,000 balls were distributed to 6,000 middle schools around the country. A teacher’s guide delivered inspirational YELLOWBALL games and challenged kids to invent their own. At the end of the programme, schools were encouraged to pass a portion of their balls on to another school - spreading the movement further.

Mobile efforts also play a key role in this movement. YELLOWBALL street performances featured acrobats, jugglers, streetballers and breakdancers. Six VERB YELLOWBALL Experience vehicles have been crossing the USA this summer, reaching kids ‘where they are’ - at summer camps, minor league baseball games, local festivals, etc. The experience features an obstacle course that can only be run with a YELLOWBALL. Upon completing the course, kids pass their ball on to the next kid waiting.

Results

VERB YELLOWBALL has so far inspired more than 9,000 blogs. More than 10,000 videos have been created. 10% of the kids touched by YELLOWBALL go on to visit the site and blog. There have been nearly 5.7 million visits to verbnow.com since launch. The school programme reached three million kids.

Target Audience

Tweens (nine to-13-year-olds)

Size

500,000+ YELLOWBALLS