2007: British Heart Foundation, Social Marketing: Case Study

Snapshot

An entertaining online game encouraged children to fight the flab by making it fun to equate what they eat with their health.

Key insights

• The British Heart Foundation (BHF) mounted a major campaign to tackle the growing childhood obesity crisis based on a clever insight: children like to learn through play.
• The result was an unconventional online game Yoobot which engaged the target audience of 11-13 year-olds while at the same time subtly educating them about the impact of healthy lifestyles.
• The Yoobot game had a major impact on this hard-to-reach young target audience, with 85% of users saying that it had made them think more about eating better and doing more to keep healthy.

Summary

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) was founded in 1961 by a group of medical professionals who were concerned about the increasing death rate from cardiovascular disease. In 1986, the BHF became more involved in public education, and in 1990 moved into rehabilitation.

One of its main campaigns has been the Food4Thought initiative, designed to help tackle the UK’s obesity crisis in children. As part of this programme it decided to try and engage with children directly.

The result was an entertaining online game called Yoobot, which allowed children to create a miniature version of themselves that they could then play games with, feed and watch it grow older. Showing the direct connection between food and health worked: 85% of the game’s audience said that Yoobot made them think more about what they ate while almost three-quarters said they would eat more healthily.

Tackling a national problem

The current obesity crisis is likely to cost the National Health Service (NHS) £50 billion by 2050, according to a 2008 report by Foresight. Currently, one in three children are obese or overweight and if the trend continues, it is predicted that a staggering 90% of today’s children will be overweight or obese by 2050. An unhealthy diet and/or being obese increases the risk of type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure and coronary heart disease — the UK’s single biggest killer. The resulting increase in life-threatening diseases is predicted to cost the NHS a crippling £50 billion a year.

In 2005 the British Heart Foundation (BHF) set up its Food4Thought initiative, which aims to tackle this through giving children the tools and information they need to make healthier, more informed food choices from an early age and thereby reducing their risk in later life. In 2008 it decided to mount a campaign to encourage 11-13 year old children to take greater responsibility for their own health by:

1. Engaging them with the issue.
2. Educating them about the future consequences of their current food choices in a personal, relevant way.
3. Empowering them to take control of their diet and make healthier dietary and lifestyle choices.

Getting the attention of an indifferent audience

Faced with a limited budget, the BHF had to be selective about which children to target. It decided on 11-13 year olds, who, having just entered secondary school, were starting to express freedom of choice in both their dietary habits and wider lifestyles. This life stage represented the ideal opportunity to influence and shape their long-term attitudes towards food.

However, several factors made 11-13 year olds an extremely difficult group to educate about health. Firstly, regardless of age, children tend to live in the moment. This means threats to their adult health feel remote — for now, they feel invincible. Secondly, linked to this, is the common misconception that ‘if you’re healthy on the outside, you’re healthy on the inside.’ So, although most of them know junk food is bad for them, they eat it anyway.

The need was thus to find a way to engage with these children for long enough to absorb and act upon the key messages. An invaluable insight pointed to the solution: that children tend to avoid anything that looks or feels like ‘education’. Many health education messages are built on ‘single-minded propositions’ (‘eat 5-a-Day’, ‘smoking causes cancer’) based on adult-imposed rules and so fall into this trap. But this isn’t how children like to learn. Instead, they like to play, explore and experiment with the world, learning rules and how to interact. In other words, they want to discover problems and solutions on their own terms.

With this in mind, the BHF set itself two key strategic principles for the eventual solution:

• To help children learn, it had to encourage in-depth engagement and exploration.
• It had to feel like it was theirs, rather than something created and imposed by adults.

By this point it was obvious the answer couldn’t be conventional. Whatever the channel, traditional advertising relies on single-mindedness and authority to deliver its message. The BHF strategic principles demanded complexity and co-ownership.

The solution: no adults allowed!

The need for an immersive environment where 11-13 year olds felt at home led naturally online. Children of 11-13 are digital natives — they feel online is their domain as they begin to use it for homework and social networking. And the natural genre within the online world is gaming. If a game was used for education, the lesson could be naughty, mischievous, funny, irreverent and free from the didacticism of the adult world. Online gaming is a channel where kids genuinely play and engage with content, and have ‘ownership’ of it. This made it the ideal medium for exploration, discovery and learning.

The resulting game, called Yoobot, was launched in November 2008. It allowed children to create a free digital, mini-version of themselves at www.yoobot.co.uk. Personalisation was key to make the exercise engaging and relevant, so they could upload a photo and give their Yoobot their own face. Users were further able to recreate their world, customising room decorations, clothes and hairstyles (Figures 1 and 2).

As the game had to be entertaining and playful, Yoobots would burp, snore, fart, break-dance, grimace and wave as well as send funny poems, one-liners, complaints and virtual birthday gifts to users by SMS and email. This gave the Yoobot a sense of personality and life that the user could relate to.

Most importantly, children could experiment on their Yoobot by setting its diet and activity routines, learning which foods were healthy or unhealthy. In particular, game play was accelerated to bring future problems into the immediate world, with one human day equating to three Yoobot years. Kids could rapidly see over the course of days the real impact of their food and lifestyle choices to their short, medium and long-term health.

For example, Yoobots could develop both internal and external health problems including weight gain, heart disease, diabetes, and high cholesterol and blood pressure, with daily health alerts. These health problems could be explored further in ‘The Lab’, where children were given the opportunity to change their lifestyles – or not – and continue to watch the future unfold before their eyes. Effectively, children were given the chance to create an educational experience as complex as they desired. Once their Yoobot died, the game featured an ‘autopsy’, allowing kids to see the effects of the lifestyle they chose. They could then investigate healthy recipes or lifestyle tips via bhf.org.uk, and were encouraged to play again.

Getting the children’s attention

Beyond the appeal of Yoobot itself, success largely hinged on the ability of the communications mix to tell children about it and create a real desire to have their own Yoobot. The media strategy was thus informed by two additional research insights:

• Children are true connectors when it comes to discussing things they like. They are indiscriminate about their sources of recommendations, happily accepting/passing them on to peers.
• Yoobot could not expect instant credibility as entertainment prior to release because it wasn’t a recognised game or genre from a known games manufacturer.

The strategic platform was therefore to ‘provoke desire for Yoobot by making it a subject for playground banter’ through:

• Creating credibility pre-launch.
• Launching with a bang.
• Enabling sharing and discussion.

A multi-channel, multi-phased approach was used to reach children in their most common environments: online, at school and in front of children’s television. Highly-targeted digital media in ‘kids only’ channels was employed to drive traffic, specifically targeting areas where children would be looking for entertainment/games.

A high-profile offline campaign helped to generate ‘banter’. Elements were deliberately complex and multi-faceted. showing a wide range of features within the game and providing talking points. This included:

• School six-sheet posters delivered to 1,200 schools nationwide (Figure 3).
• Launch-day direct marketing packs, distributed to the desks of one million school children.
• In particular, television advertising on popular kids’ channel Nickelodeon was employed to add a sense of scale, intrigue and credibility.

Playing a winning game

The original objectives were to engage, educate and empower. It fulfilled all three successfully.

Objective 1: Engage
More than one million Yoobots were created in just two months exceeding the initial target of 150,000 by 550%. Approximately 400,000 of these registrations were in the target age range (about 19% of the 2.16 million 11-13 year olds) while
about 90% were under 14.

This strong result was in part due to the highly-targeted media strategy, which resulted in 40% of the 11-13 target being aware of Yoobot. This high awareness fuelled playground banter, with Yoobot becoming a ‘must have’ game in the run-up
to Christmas:

• 68% of users talked about it with friends, family or in chat rooms.
• Yoobot was the third fastest growing UK search term at launch (just above Britney Spears).

It proved so popular, in fact, that were it a commercial game it would have joined the elite group of 11 games that have achieved ‘Diamond’ status (selling one million units in the UK) and the 48 that have achieved ‘Double Platinum’ (600,000 units). The success as an entertainment property was due to the fact that children enjoyed playing the game:

• 76% thought Yoobot was brilliant/very good and well worth their time.
• 68% of users logged in at least once every couple of days, 85% at least once a week.
• The average site visit lasted six minutes.

This means 68% of users actively engaged with an educational message for roughly 20 minutes a week. But did they actually absorb and act upon the key messages?

Objective 2: Educate

Yoobot definitely made kids think more about their diets. 85% of users said the game had “made me think more about the food I eat and do more to keep healthy” — 24% higher than the previous Food4Thought Junkmonkeys campaign. It also helped children realise that their current diet had an important effect on their future health.

• There was a 14-point increase in the kids who understood that “At my age the things I eat are important and can have an impact on my health and my long term health”.
• There was a significant uplift in those feeling that their diet and health was something they should be thinking about now (Figure 4). Children even learned about the specific diseases linked to obesity (Figure 5).

Objective 3: Empower

Success at engagement and education made the issue important to children:

• 72% of the target now said they “think about my diet a lot, it’s important to me” — a 25 point increase pre-to-post (from 47%).
• 63% claimed they wished they ate more healthily — up 22 points from 41% pre-wave.

This, in turn, led to all-important behavioural changes: 70% of users said Yoobot had made them eat more healthily. This implied that of the one million+ registrations, 730,000 had already taken steps to eat more healthily (Figure 6).

A pronounced return on investment

This Yoobot campaign was also very cost-effective. At a cost of £1.85 for each of the 730,000 children who reported changing their diet, Yoobot was cheaper than other intervention methods.

For example:

• School initiatives, such as free school meals, cost hundreds per child per year.
• Restricting junk food advertising is estimated to cost £3.20 per child, per extra year of good health. Even if Yoobot was repeated annually, this still equates to at least a 42% saving over restriction.

Furthermore, the financial savings from Yoobot during 2015-2050 could be estimated using obesity prevalence/cost projections:

• NHS costs of obesity alone: £5,800 per person.
• Total wider costs of elevated body mass index: £40,600 per person.

It follows that to break even the campaign would need to change the long-term behaviour of just:

• 33 people based on NHS costs.
• 233 people based on wider costs.

It would therefore require just 1% of the 730,000 to convert their dietary improvements into long-term healthy habits for the 2008 campaign to pay for itself 30 times over.

Building on success

By 2009 the BHF decided to mount an even more ambitious campaign by promoting a new game, Ultimate Dodgeball, to get children to be more physically active. Pre-launch the BHF again reached out to teachers through a compelling direct mailing, offering them a pack which contained lots of suggestions for fun, including cool dance moves and interesting recipes, along with everything the school would need to play a Dodgeball game or tournament.

It also introduced a new personality to the Yoobot site: the Yoonot, which acted as the Yoobot’s alter ego, encouraging it to eat junk food and be lazy. The user could only defeat the Yoonot in an online game of Ultimate Dodgeball. The campaign culminated with National Yoobot Day on December 21, 2009, where children were given the opportunity to ‘make their Yoobot famous’ by entering a competition where they could win the chance for their Yoobot to appear on Nickelodeon.

The results of this second campaign were equally impressive.

By February 2010:

• 40% of those using Yoobot had returned from last year.
• 60% of children said Yoobot made them want to exercise more regularly.
• 63% of children said Yoobot made them want to eat healthier food.
• 72% said Yoobot was excellent/ very good.
• 28% had played Dodgeball either at home or at school.
• 60% enjoyed playing Dodgeball and would do so again and 88% had something positive to say about Dodgeball.
• One in six went on the Yheart website after seeing Yoobot. Yheart is the young people’s site at the British Heart Foundation.
• The Yoobot site received almost a million visits in the two months after campaign launch.
• Half a million Yoobots were created in the first four months after the launch of Food4Thought5.

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