How To... Engage Kids in Advertising

Chocolate is the key to a kid's heart, something 72U Amsterdam discovered when it launched Choco Bizz Kids, an experience that encourages kids into sustainable entrepreneurship, by challenging them to launch a new chocolate brand.

While it might seem like an ideal scenario (for the kids), 72U creatives attempted to educate them on the importance of being socially-minded in business and teach them about building businesses sustainably.

Groups of kids aged between nine and 12 were invited to the agency to launch the new chocolate product, design the logo, pitch it to a bank and bring it to market.

We caught up with the Programme Directors Hanneke Metselaar and Nico Stumpo to find out why it's so important to engage kids in advertising.

Although advertising is around and present everywhere, it is still a pretty unknown industry for most people. Some people have a vague idea of what advertising is, but no one is really sure of what we do all day!

I believe that to change things you need to involve the younger generations, as they are the ones who are going to lead in the future, so it is better for everyone to prepare them as well as we can.

As a company, our mission is to expand and diversify the creative class, allowing more people form different backgrounds to access this industry, bringing in kids, inspiring them and showing them what you can do in this creative industry.

Do you like to write? You could work here! You like singing? You could work here. Are you passionate about numbers and programming? You can definitely work here.

Feasting on the brief

Our brief was to guide the kids along the process of developing a fair and sustainable chocolate brand. From learning all about the chocolate-making process - including how farmers and workers get paid - to creating a logo, building a business plan and pitching it to a bank.

We kept them really busy for five days and they were amazing to work with. We were also luck enough to find the best partners for this project (Fawaka, Dynamo and Tony Chocolonely).

Overall, we wanted to give them the opportunity to understand the different roles and parts that are baked into our daily jobs.

They say you shouldn't work with kids...

It is the most rewarding work experience we ever had. To stimulate the curiosity of the kids; help them out in their tasks; and see the happiness that the program brought to them was incredibly overwhelming.

Maintaining the sugar high

Surprisingly, there weren't any real challenges working with kids. Other than making sure they weren’t eating loads of chocolate all day long :)

Lessons Learnt

The biggest lesson we took home was that creativity has no boundaries. It was super inspiring to see how super creative we all are in the early stages of our lives. Ideas run freely in their brains and come out very pure.

Growing up, we tend to lose this freedom of thoughts. My focus now is to find a way to stay young in the mind and to avoid all the boundaries that we build up as we grow.