Nationwide
Client: Nationwide
Product: Make Safe Happen
Title: ABC Sleeper
Media: baby pajamas
Country: USA
Date Of Campaign: 20 April 2017
Background: Since 1954, Nationwide has made it their mission to help parents create a healthy environment to protect kids from accidental injuries, a belief that grew out of their founding principle that insurance is a promise to protect what matters most. Over 60 years later, they started Make Safe Happen, a child safety program, dedicated to raising awareness around the #1 cause of death in children: accidental injury. Critical to this mission is ensuring that parents employ safe sleep techniques for their infants, as every year in the US over 3,500 healthy infants die in their sleep as a result of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (S.I.D.S.). While there is no verifiable cure, over the years the American Academy of Pediatrics, a leading organization dedicated to the health of all children, have refined a simple method to help save lives: put babies down to sleep ALONE, without anything that can block their breathing, on their BACK in an empty CRIB. But this advice isn’t catching on. So as a Make Safe Happen Advisory Council partner, they worked together to help teach parents across America their sleep safety rule. We were tasked to create an item that would teach parents about sleep safety and create awareness for MakeSafeHappen.com.
Idea: Despite wanting to do the best things for their babies, most new parents do not know the important sleep safety steps of Alone, Back, Crib. So it was critically important for the child safety program, Make Safe Happen, to teach parents these steps.We chose expectant and new parents (first-time parents with a child under the age of one) as our target, since they are less jaded than established parents and therefore more receptive to advice and guidance. However, in their search for advice these parents are bombarded with an array of purported “authorities.” So, we realized the best way to reach them was at the moment they were putting their baby to sleep. To cut through the clutter and deliver the safest method determined by the American Academy of Pediatrics for putting an infant to sleep, we created the ABC Sleeper. Our sleepwear communicated the sleep safety tip Alone Back Crib at the moment that a parent or caregiver puts the baby down to sleep. By creating The ABC Sleeper we were able to transform the plain baby pajama into a device to communicate an important safety tip. We used a baby-safe glow-in-the-dark ink to highlight the words “Alone, Back, Crib” from the pajama’s alphabet design. The technique was applied to thousands of cotton pajamas, which were then wrapped in a sleeve. The sleeves were designed to match the Make Safe Happen brand esthetic and drive parents to makesafehappen.com for more sleep safety tips. The ABC Sleepers were distributed to Nationwide Insurance agents across the United States to be given as collateral for their customers.
Results: The ABC Sleeper was a huge success with Nationwide associates and distribution partners, garnering much more excitement and interest than even initially anticipated. An initial batch of 1,400 quickly sold out, and as a result Nationwide ordered a second print run for continued distribution. With the pajamas in the hands of actual parents, Nationwide has found a way to continually deliver crucial safety information at the moment when it’s needed most, thereby reminding parents to always put their babies down to sleep the safest way possible. Ultimately, our ABC Sleeper helped reaffirm Make Safe Happen as a trusted authority in a sea of safety messaging.
