Goal

Empower parents and caregivers to engage with their children from the moment they’re born. Efforts needed to focus on lower-income families ($75k annual HHI and less) with children ages 0-5 in California, with special emphasis on mothers, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and hard-to-reach communities.

What We Knew

Research informed us that a baby’s brain is a developmental miracle, with approximately 90% of its growth occurring by age 5. But it was hard for our audiences to grasp a behaviorally persuasive science. We had to find a simpler, more memorable way to communicate the importance of engaging with the baby from the moment they’re born.

TV / Video / Digital / Outdoor / Print / Experiential / Book / Research

We isolated three basic activities that all parents were already engaged in or familiar with: Talk. Read. Sing. To increase memorability, we created the Three Brainy Birds property, then turned Talk. Read. Sing. into a song. We knew that the key to human communications is the idea that words that rhyme is how children learn words. Words that rhyme and are set to song are remembered and played back even better. So to increase recall of the website, one of our birds sang the URL.

The Brainy Birds property extended to multiple platforms, including a children’s book, and across Spanish, Mixtec, Zapotec, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hmong and Russian languages. We created TV, video, digital, outdoor, toolkits, puppets, and in-community communications.

We developed the First 5 Express, a traveling interactive exhibit that toured for almost a decade across California engaging with over 200,000 parents, caregivers, and young children, and distributed over 583,000 free resources to families.

According to research done by a leading University, this is the most successful public service effort in the history of such efforts and has positively changed behaviors in California parents.

• Created an 87% awareness in California parents
• Over 250,000 social media followers and 85,000 -150,000 hits to their website every month
• Distributed 427,000 free resources to families
• 75% of parents reported talking, reading and singing to their children as a result of the campaign