Insight
In Paraguay, almost 50,000 innocent children, whose dreams are forever shattered as they are traded for food and shelter in the hopes of having a better life away from their families, are domestic worker children. Very poor families from rural areas give their children to urban families to help on household chores in exchange for food, shelter and schooling. They ended up being exploited by the host family and many times lose contact with their biological families.
A complex problem that has two targets: the generator (rural families taking their children to other families) and the receiver (urban families receiving boys and girls and make them work at home). The client needed to reach both targets, mainly the generator, to give primarily instruction about the problem and to generate buzz in the Paraguayan society.
Strategy
Initiative had to reach families in rural areas. That is why it chose the most massive communication media in rural areas: Radio (99% of penetration). The agency visited rural communities in potential danger and talked to them.
They have a lot of problems, and they feel that the national media (as main TV stations, the other most important massive media) are very far away from their problems. In the other hand, local and communities radios are the closer way to inform and help them. Radio is their voice and it has the same style to talk. So, along with communities the agency developed drama workshops about the issue and with them as protagonists created a radio soap opera about domestic worker children.
Execution
The power of creativity was a better performance: the idea of co-creating a soap opera responded effectively to the objectives. It used the power of entertainment to generate a social change. It educated communities in potential danger. It spread the information to other communities with actual content and it was done by people like them and not by actors or actresses. The soap opera had seven chapters. And the effort to air to them wasn’t very big, because a lot of local radios of the whole country called to ask for the soap opera file, after it started to talk about the campaign in the main newspapers of the country.
Results
More than 80 radio stations from the interior of the country broadcasted the soap opera, generating more than 3,400 minutes of free media spot. The campaign garnered free publicity worth $300,000 (eg. nine articles in the main newspaper of the country, ABC colour, and many articles in the online version of international newspapers like El Mundo from Spain).
This campaign wasn’t the first campaign to talk about this problem. But it was the first campaign that changed the way to present the problem and generating a lot of buzz about it. The most important outcome was the contribution to the enactment of the national law number 4788/12 that identifies the Criadazgo problem (“criados” is the popular word to define that kind of domestic workers) as human traffic.