Cheil Worldwide Korea helps protect students from bullying with the “Friends Name Tag”

South Korea is not alone in tackling school violence. According to one survey, about 50% of students responded that they had witnessed a friend being bullied, but had to ignore it for fear of being revenged. So Cheil Worldwide focused on the bystanders. They wanted to help students protect their bullied friends, instead of ignoring them.

Another survey revealed that 30% of all school violence occurred in March and April when the new semester begins and social hierarchy starts to form among students. (In Korea, the first semester starts at March every year.)

Therefore, the right time to solve this issue should be at the beginning of a new semester. To make students not become bystanders, Cheil created the “Friends Name Tag”, a special name tag with two names on it: the owner’s name, and a friend’s name. With this name tag, students easily get closer to each other. The campaign was launched on March 9, 2015, when the “Friends Name Tags” were distributed to 298 first-graders at one middle high school in Seoul.

VIEW THE CONCEPT

Besides encouraging students to become friends, the “Friends Name Tag” had one more function. With an embedded emergency alarm system, students who see friends being bullied can easily help them, instead of ignoring them. When a student pushes a button on the name tag, teachers are notified right away through computers and wearable devices. To prevent secondary harm, every piece of information is processed and converted to unique IDs, so that only the teachers can recognize where the call came from.

During the campaign, 106 calls were made that led to teacher-student counseling sessions. Moreover, no bullying occurred despite the high expected rate of bullying. This result is inspiring, considering the fact that the annual average of bullying occurrences during March and April was 8.5 over the past 6 years.

Inspired by this success, our client – the Seoul Metropolitan Government – is showing the campaign film to promote anti-bullying policy with 100 billboards, 1,035 screens of public transportations, and official screens of 25 district offices. Moreover, the campaign is being considered to expand to other schools.

Credits –

Production Company: Breakfast Film