Nov 19th 2020
Vungle Ad Campaign for U.N.’s ‘Global Call Out To Creatives’ Wins Award
On behalf of Vungle, I’m delighted to accept this award. Many dedicated members of the Vungle team globally contributed toward this achievement. The objectives of the creative in this campaign were triggered when at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.N. and World Health Organization (WHO) issued a “Global Call Out To Creatives” to help stop the spread of COVID-19 through visual content that conveyed public health messages creatively and effectively.
The focus of the brief was for designers to create visual content explaining what steps people could take to slow the spread of COVID-19, including personal hygiene, physical distancing, and tackling harmful misinformation.
When Vungle heard the call, we knew we had to take part. Like a modern-day Rosie the Riveter effort, we pooled our design talent, data analytics, and gaming expertise, and set out to create a series of interactive playable ads that would amplify COVID-19 prevention messages to gamers worldwide, using fresh, innovative content to engage people in a memorable way.
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After looking at the U.N. and WHO’s main goals and objectives, we selected the mobile playable ad format as the most effective creative medium. Playable ads are dynamic, non-verbal ads that can transcend language and cultural barriers that might otherwise mean that certain messages don’t carry or fall flat. We chose to capture physical distancing and personal hygiene, which were some of the most important messages that many governments have deemed necessary in their emergency response. The first group in the campaign illustrated the key steps to properly wash your hands by encouraging the app user to swipe backwards and forwards, accompanied by a ticking clock. The second group reinforced two-meter physical distancing guidelines through a game where the player dodges a series of falling shapes by shifting position with timed finger swipes.
We applied creative testing to learn, scale, and adapt the ads at rapid speed to enhance user experience while still achieving engagement goals. Our global ad platform, which serves mobile ads to more than one-third of the world’s mobile devices, gives the team access to creative insights on a massive scale.
Vungle was also able to deliver public health messages to hard-to-reach groups, translating messages into 22 different languages, including Urdu, Bengali, and Swahili. After testing, we tailored the content to each ads’ placement context for a smooth and appealing in-app experience.
In this Vungle team effort, we were happy to donate staff time, resources, equipment, and external consultancy to support the development and testing of these playable ads, and the platform distribution was also handled free-of-charge. We’re proud to say that the ads have attracted over 36,771,804 million views, reaching both Apple and Android users in over a dozen countries. And the work now also sits in a WHO library of artwork that will be used to educate individuals and communities all across the world as we continue to navigate this global crisis and, hopefully, learn from it for next time. It’s been an honor to take part in the U.N.’s Call to Creatives initiative, and it’s shown Vungle how in-app ads can be extremely effective in communicating messages for social good—now and in the future.
