Savlon’s Healthy Hand Chalk Sticks
Winner of “The Grand Prix For Creative Effectiveness” award at Cannes Lion 2018
It all started when my team and I decided to participate in the course “Introduction to Advertising & Public Relations” by Betty Tsakarestou, who is the head of this course and the “AD Discovery & Creativity Lab”. In this course, we were assigned in weekly team projects which would help us dive more and more into the meaning of this lab. The project which got our attention and we found it really interesting was the “Grand Prix Winners from Cannes Lions 2018”.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is an annual global event which takes place at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes, France. The five-day festival has been bringing the creative communications industry together every year at its one-of-a-kind event in Cannes to learn, network and celebrate. Over 10.000 people from 90 countries approximately visit the festival in order to discuss industry issues and communicate with people of their common field. The lion-shaped award was inspired by the lion in Piazza San Marco in Venice.
After doing some research and watching all the campaigns, our favorite one was “Ogilvy: Savlon Healthy Hands Chalk Sticks”.
In India, more than a thousand children die every day due to poor hand hygiene. Considering this critical issue, Ogilvy Mumbai and the soap company Savlon wanted to help to address with a creative, low cost and simple way this very specific problem. Most kids in rural schools in India do not practice the habit of washing their hands properly when they are about to eat. This habit is the cause of illness and school dropouts.
That’s where Savlon’s ongoing school outreach initiative — ‘Healthy India Mission’, steps up. They took account that in primary schools of rural India, children still use black-slate and chalk sticks to write with, getting their hands dirty with chalk powder. So Savlon took advantage of this and decided to create a mixture of chalk powder and soap granules.
From now on, when the children write and wipe the black slate with their bare hands and chalk powder gets smeared all over them, they can properly wash their hands under the tap, since the chalk powder turns into soap. As a result, they can eat their lunch without taking the risk of getting sick.
This innovative idea had a great impact in children’s life and generally in India because it converted a behavior that had a negative impact to their health into a healthy one. To put it simply, Savlon did not force the kids to change the behavior of washing their hands only with water. Instead, they created a symbiosis with the behavior that they were already doing, by adding soap in chalk sticks.
By doing this, they tried to promote proper hand washing in a place were parents do not demand it and teachers struggle to enforce it. Although, that does not mean that it solved only a current problem, but it laid the foundation to eliminate a problem that could affect the next generations as well.
Even though they faced some crucial difficulties, such as to inform properly about this problem or to be careful how they will present it without offending anyone, they tried their best to achieve their goal. That’s the reason why this innovative campaign won the award “The Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness” in Cannes Lions 2018. And this is why my team and I selected “Savlon Healthy Hands Chalk Sticks”, because of this simplicity and effectiveness in indian people’s life.
Betty Tsakarestou Νεφέλη Παπαγιαννοπούλου Maria Spanou Maira Kokkoni
