Let’s Just Play

Nickelodeon’s initiative to combat childhood obesity

Project

Inspire children to exercise, teach them about nutrition, and help them find access to fresh produce. This yearlong, company-wide program was a way to ensure each division of the company was doing their part to help kids combat the obesity pandemic. Every year, we celebrated with a Worldwide Day of Play where all programming was shut off for 2 hours and kids were encouraged to go outside and engage with the events we had set up around the world or games we had shared across platforms.

Role: Member of Task Force

Process

• Create a badge program that rewarded kids for getting physical.

• Recruit celebrities to be ambassadors throughout the year.

• Identify the 4 key areas that hasten childhood obesity (lack of access to fresh produce, junk food marketing, sedentary lifestyle, poor knowledge of nutrition) and create a persona with accompanying narrative about combatting each. That way, kids could pick the one they identify with most and follow the journey all year long—hopefully picking up pointers along the way.

• Funnel all attention toward the one-day celebration.

• Act as a conduit with companywide stakeholders to coordinate programming shutdown and messaging on WWDOP.