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2020 One Show - Social Media

Back to School Essentials

Agency BBDO / New York + Smuggler / New York

Client Sandy Hook Promise
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Annual ID

OS_SM20_033S

About the Work

In America, almost 15,000 children are killed or injured in gun-related incidents every year. People seem to have accepted this “new normal”, and focus on teaching kids how to survive school shootings, rather than preventing them. To highlight this absurdity, Sandy Hook Promise created a PSA that at first appears to be just another typical, back-to-school ad. But things take a darker turn when it becomes clear that there’s a shooter in the school, and the pupils have to use their new school items to survive. The PSA ends with the message that the only real back-to-school essential is learning the signs of a shooter, and stopping shootings before they happen. To launch the film, we engaged influencers, who released the film on their channels as a “back-to-school” film–without revealing that it was for Sandy Hook Promise. Several influencers also created their own content, turning their back-to-school shopping “haul videos” into shooting survival guides. People kept sharing the PSA, with the result that it received 26 million views in the first 24 hours alone. It also became a trending topic on Twitter, got shared by celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Mark Ruffalo, and generated 3.9 billion media impressions.