Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition Issues Social Media RFP
The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is an alliance driven by the vision of a world without malnutrition. Created in 2002 at a Special Session of the UN General Assembly on Children, GAIN supports public-private partnerships to increase access to the missing nutrients in diets necessary for people, communities and economies to be stronger and healthier. In Indonesia, it has operated since 2012 and collaborates closely with the Ministry of health and other national and international organizations.
Growing attention has been focused on the importance of improving nutrition of girls during adolescence for her health and well-being and for that of her future children. Adolescent girls (AGs) require special attention for a number of reasons. Firstly, girls face specific nutritional needs due to the physical changes that take place during puberty. Adolescents aged 15-19 have the greatest total energy requirements compared to any other age group (~2,420 kcal/day)1 and also have higher micronutrient needs. The onset of menstruation with its ensuing blood loss, increases iron requirements relative to their male peers, while bone and muscular development requires higher calcium intakes in order to reach the optimum peak bone mass and to protect against osteoporosis later in life2.
In Indonesia, many adolescent girls get married between 16-19 years and give birth while their own bodies are still growing. This leads to increased nutritional demands and competition between the needs of the fetus and the needs of its still developing young mother, resulting in high-risk pregnancies and childbirth, and high prevalence of low birth weight babies.
Indonesian AG Nutrition and Eating Habits
The following statistics show the poor nutritional status of Indonesia AGs:
∙ A study in east Java early found that a third (31%) of 16-18 year olds are stunted
∙ Nationally, nearly half (47%) of all non-pregnant girls aged 15-19 years old are undernourished.7
This “double burden” of malnutrition – a combination of undernutrition and over nutrition – co- existing in the same population is a growing problem in many parts of Asia where diets have recently changed.
Technology and Social Media Use in Indonesia
In Indonesian there are an estimated 300 million active mobile phone subscribers, approximately one third of which have mobile broadband subscriptions (i.e. wireless internet access.) Youth are attracted to new technologies and innovation, and have become early adopters and avid users of social media platforms, mostly used on their mobile phones. With 78 million users, Indonesia contains the 4th largest Facebook population in the world10 about 70% of which are under age 25, and is tied with Mexico has having more Twitter active users than any other country in the world.11 In 2012, the city of Jakarta posted more tweets than any other city on earth.
Social Media and youth snacking
These two trends, adolescent malnutrition and the growth of social media, come together in the promotion of EDNP food and beverages, which have been aggressively marketed over social media10-13. There are many examples of this, but a few with publically available data include campaigns run by companies such as Mondelez International and Coca-Cola14. For the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Coca-Cola wanted to increase awareness and brand association with the World Cup among adolescents and young adults (ages 13–29)14. Coca- Cola worked with Medacom Indonesia and developed a Facebook campaign, which allowed views to upload a campaign-specific music video directly to their Facebook News Feed. The Facebook campaign generated 1.48 million video plays in five weeks and reached a total of 17.1 million people; 32% of the target market (Indonesians under 29 years old) saw the campaign. Similarly, Mondelez International used Facebook as a platform to reach Indonesian youth when marketing the Oreo Mini product line14. Internationally, food seems to be a very significant subject matter for adolescents on social media.
A study in Sweden found that 85% of images shared by adolescents on Instagram contained food items15 and that most of these images (67.7%) depicted EDNP food and beverages and many were influenced by major food marketing campaigns.
GAIN has the daunting task of creating a social media campaign to combat these messages and promote healthy snacking / discourage unhealthy snacking. The task is made even more difficult by an on-line climate heavily saturated with not only this marketing of unhealthy foods, but a sea of other on-line diet-related advice targeting AGs, including celebrity- endorsements, “fitspiration” (fitness inspiration), detox or other fad diets or weight loss schemes and advice disseminated by pseudo-experts23. All this clutter creates the extra challenge of being able to stand out in the crowd of potentially harmful misinformation.
Statement of Work
The Purpose of the RFP is to hire a social media agency to help GAIN develop a social media (SM) strategy and plan, and to design, execute and monitor a SM campaign to improve snacking behavior among adolescent girls aged 16-19 in Indonesia.
Goal and Objectives of the SM Campaign
Campaign goal: to inform adolescent girls aged 16-19 about healthy snacks / discourage unhealthy snacks.
- To communicate with our target audience about healthy/unhealthy snacking in an innovative, memorable and engaging manner
∙ Reach: total general reach/post and total reach/post by site followers (e.g. page views, Likes, organic and ad reach, impressions)
- To drive conversations around our theme of healthy/unhealthy snacking through questions/comments to us or peer-to-peer content sharing
∙ Virality: the percentage of people who create a story from a post (such as liking, commenting, or sharing) of those who saw it.
∙ Engagement: the number of unique people who clicked anywhere on a post. (Comments/questions, tags, # of user submitted content)
- To develop compelling and attractive landing pages on most popular social media platforms and drive traffic to those pages.
∙ Pages up and running, linked to social media platforms
Target Audience (or Target Group (TG)
Our primary target audience is adolescent girls aged16-19 years who use social media. We assume they are richer and more urban than the general Indonesian population and that they are largely in high school (age 16-17) or college (age18-19) and concerned with typical adolescent interests, i.e., their peer groups and friends, dating, beauty, fashion, etc. GAIN is currently undertaking a detailed study of these girls involving both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, to further define their demographics, their general aspirations, motivations and habits, their exposure to various media, and use of specific social media, their food consumption and snacking behaviour, and associated determinants of that behaviour. The findings of this study will form the basis of development of the social media campaign and the selected creative agency will have an opportunity to inform and learn from that research.
Campaign Platforms:
The selection of social media platforms to be used in the campaign will be finalized based on the results of the CIS, but it is expected that the campaign would use FB, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat , BIGO, LINE, and Youtube and/or other social media platforms most commonly used by Indonesian AGs.
Campaign Content:
The main “messages” will be finalized after completion of the formative research (CIS), but these would promote healthy snacking / discourage unhealthy snacking. The content will be informed by the major psycho-social determinants/drivers of snacking behaviour among AG’s, which are likely to involve their peer groups/social eating, taste/sensory perceptions, affordability, convenience, body image, environment.
The campaign should include some of the following suggested:
Clever campaign branding, tagline and #hashtag appearing throughout
∙ Button, badges, emojis or other forms of shareable graphic images (Ideally meme-able)
∙ Animated, short videos or Vines (that might be replicated and personalized)
∙ Photographs or selfies of “behavers” eating healthy (encouraging others to do so & share pics)
∙ Games or quizzes that engage (example: Duel Otak game)
∙ Recipes or short videos of recipes
∙ Listicles, or other forms of “Click Bait”
∙ Promotion that can be posted on existing popular youth websites (youth health website, magazines, music sites, etc..)
∙ Celebrity endorsements who can act as advocates/amplifiers of the campaign (Youtube stars or beauty vlogers)
Campaign Tone and Characteristics
The campaign’s tone should also flow from the results of the CIS and a deeper understanding of our TG’s aesthetic and voice. But GAIN seeks a tone that will make the campaign “sticky” and have as many of the following characteristics as possible:
∙ Keep messages (tag lines, graphics, videos, etc..) short, simple and concrete.
∙ Campaign should include disruptive element(s) of surprise, be eye-catching, provoke curiosity, and grab attention.
∙ Campaign related to healthy snacking should try to tap into positive emotions such as humour, excitement, inspiration, nostalgia, or cuteness, and potentially shocking or disgusting (“ickiness”) emotions for unhealthy snacks.
∙ Encourage personal storytelling, social ability and community-building.
∙ Be “cool” – however our TG defines that – mimicking the style and tone of currently popular
Proposal due by September 18, 2016 to:
