CASE STUDY: How Ebara coaxed children to eat vegetables with games

Background

Getting children to eat vegetables is never easy. Parents are always looking for things to entertain them and entice them to eat their greens.

Aim

Ebara wanted to engage a new generation of moms to raise their awareness of Ebara’s sauce, which can remove the taste of bitterness from vegetables and make them more tasty and enjoyable for children.

Execution

Ebara worked with Beacon/Leo Burnett Tokyo to create a website with games that enables children to interact with vegetables and have fun.

Through the game “Funfair in Your Mouth”, children can chomp virtual vegetables to drive jet planes or rollercoasters. After reaching the next stage of the game, they have to eat real vegetables to continue. The site recognises the colours of the vegetables, and sends off a colourful firework explosions on the screen with each bite. The participates can take snap photos to share on Facebook and twitter.

Ebara also held three pop-up funfair events in the amusement parks in Japan’s three major cities. An experiential VR device using bone conduction technology made vegetables vibrate in a way to create feelings of fireworks or dinosaurs partying in children’s mouth when they chewed their way through the vegetables.

The campaign is supported by print, TV, online banner-ads, digital, events, mobile application and social media.

Results

The campaign was launched on 8 May, and is ongoing until the end of December.

So far, more than 2,500,000 virtual vegetables and 25,000 real vegetables have been registered on the site. A total of 15,000 people participated in the five-day pop up funfair events held in July and August.

During the launch of the site and the pop up funfairs, Ebara’s sales had increased 130 per cent over the year before.

CREDITS

Campaign title Funfair in Your Mouth
Client Ebara Foods Industry, Inc.
Client contact Eisuke Mohri
Agency Beacon Communications (Leo Burnett) Tokyo
Creatives Kohei Kawasaki, Jun Oizumi, Tomohiko Nakano, Tomonori Oki, Yongbom Seo, Jon King  Production Company amana inc., Tokyo (Film) / Synario inc., Tokyo (Event) / BIRDMAN inc., Tokyo (Web) / plaplax ltd.
Sound designer Kangarou Suzuki, Motokazu Ono
Media channels Branded utility, Digital outdoor, Event, Gaming, New technologies, Online, Websites & Microsites