OOH technology helps Heinz to make breakfast magic

A recent Work and Pensions Family Resources Survey concluded that 1.7 million children are at risk of starting the day hungry. Many families face increasing financial pressure, and it’s the children from these households who start the school day on an empty stomach, lacking the proper nutrients they need to absorb and understand lessons in class.   

Heinz supports the charity Magic Breakfast, which works with more than 1,000 partner schools in the UK to provide nutritious breakfast food, to about 200,000 children. Heinz has pledged 16 million meals to Magic Breakfast since their partnership began in 2019 and wanted to create something that would punch well above its weight, generate PR and propel the topic into the consciousness of the UK. 

Strategy  

Children find it harder to concentrate in school when they have not had breakfast. Their brain response slows down, and it becomes hard to focus on tasks like reading. So, we needed a strategy and an idea that would allow people to experience this. 

The creative proposal was to show the viewer how hard it is for children to focus when they go to school hungry. By utilising Ocean’s interactive state-of-the-art LookOut technology, which can recognise and track the gaze of the viewer(s) looking at the OOH screen. The longer the viewer looks at the screen, the creative adapts in real-time and transports the passer-by into the mind of a hungry child who finds it difficult to concentrate on their schoolwork with an empty stomach. 

Execution

Heinz Beanz displayed their campaign across nine interactive digital large format OOH screens situated in high footfall areas across roadside, commuter and retail spaces during the February half-term. The activity ran in six key cities; Birmingham, London, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Southampton - chosen explicitly as locations, as they all have more than 30% of children living in poverty. 

Following the insight on children’s brain function when they haven’t eaten breakfast, we created panels that showed the viewer a headline ‘It’s harder for children to focus when they’re hungry’. Using OOH gaze recognition technology, each time someone looked at our headline - it changed, becoming blurry and difficult to read, then floated away from their gaze.

Results

With an objective to reach the consciousness of the British public the campaign was a resounding success delivering 2.7m impacts, reaching over 1.1m people across the week. Supporting PR generated an additional 46M impressions with 38 pieces of consumer coverage and 15 pieces of marketing trade coverage.

The campaign also won The Drum ‘of the day’ for its innovative creative work.