THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 8th Annual Shorty Impact Awards

New Old News — UNICEF

Winner in Short Form Video

Silver Honor in Global Campaign, Public Health

Audience Honor in Global Campaign, Nonprofit, Short Form Video

Objectives

The COVID-19 pandemic fueled the largest sustained backslide in childhood vaccination in three decades. 67 million children over three pandemic years missed out on the routine immunizations that keep them safe from deadly diseases. This caused preventable and life-threatening diseases such as polio, measles and diphtheria to re-emerge in countries all over the world, even those that hadn’t seen these diseases for years. In 2023, as part of our immunization advocacy strategy to #BuildBackImmunity, UNICEF asked the governments most affected by backsliding to politically and financially prioritize catch-up immunization activities to reach the children who missed out on their vaccines during the pandemic. 

“New Old News” shared this message by contrasting old broadcast footage (50s-90s) with current headlines mentioning the resurgence of preventable diseases globally. It foregrounds the urgent challenge of the past coming back into the present, but lands on the positive and hopeful message that we’ve overcome these illnesses before through immunization, and we can do it again. This narrative encourages viewers to look at the past, see the historical success of essential vaccines, and realize that UNICEF has a plan to reach the millions of children that missed out on immunization due to disruptions caused by COVID-19.  

Strategy and Execution

The New Old News campaign was designed to launch UNICEF's State of the World’s Children Report 2023 (SOWC), our flagship annual publication that presented a definitive overview of the state of global immunization. The campaign was ideated with global reach in mind, as the immunization backslide has affected communities all over the world. Thus, producing content in multiple languages and formats was incredibly important to have the global response needed to reach the campaign’s advocacy goals. The launch kicked off a year-long advocacy campaign, starting with the SOWC (April 20), then World Immunization Week (April 24-30), and other moments during the year where we targeted governments, media and the public with our message to immunize more children.  

To develop the hero video, we first identified archival footage (from the 50s to the 90s) and recent video clips from various countries and in different languages and formats. As a global campaign, we wanted to ensure the content was diverse enough and relevant to different audiences. We realized there was more footage available from the Americas and Europe than from other parts of the world, so we adapted the original concept to include old newspapers, news articles, and footage of immunization campaigns to ensure that the diversity was clear. 

The creative concept was developed and executed by WILD FI, an agency based in Latin America; the production was managed by UNICEF’s multimedia team, which comprises personnel from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe; we also worked with various teams from around the world including UNICEF country and regional offices, to strategize the campaign’s development, to create its components, and plan the distribution of the assets across UNICEF’s channels. This came with its own set of challenges, such as language barriers, ethical representation of diversity, and creating multiple versions of the same asset to appeal to cultural and political needs in different markets. 

UNICEF is no stranger to these challenges, and once we had overcome them, we had a package of multilingual multimedia and digital content that informed audiences about the backsliding, showcased specific interventions, outlined UNICEF's actions, and asked governments to address the backsliding. This included: 

Results

Media

Video for New Old News — UNICEF

Entrant Company / Organization Name

UNICEF HQ

Links

Entry Credits