You can imagine the scene. It's early morning, back in the spring, and the streets are cold. There's snow on the ground, and more snow is falling.
In front of you you see a baby stroller. You hear the cry of a baby. You look around and you see no one.
You approach the stroller, curious but also worried. You look inside.
There is no baby. What you find is a tape recorder, playing the sound of a baby crying.
There's a note. It reads: "Thank you for caring. We hope there are more people like you. UNICEF. Be a mom for a moment.”
It was a pitch for donations. The note contained a UNICEF web site where people could donate funds to help the world's abandoned children.
The campaign was the creation of Taivas, an agency based in Helsinki, Finland.
“We thought maternity is not just biology. It’s a state of mind,” says Adele Enersen, a copywriter at Taivas who helped come up with the idea.
“By helping UNICEF, you are the mother, at least a momentarily. So the campaign idea ‘Be a mom for a moment’ was born. We thought we needed to show abandoned babies in our culture, somehow, someway."
Enersen says the idea for the carriages was inspired by the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's movie "The Battleship Potemkin."
"There's a scene where baby strollers fall down the stairs, and a mother is shot to death. It’s really effective," she says. "So we got an idea about abandoned strollers."
At first, the agency crew thought the idea might be too edgy. They took a night to sleep on it. The next morning, refreshed, they all agreed it was just the right thing to do, and they got to work getting the creative together.
Then a curious thing happened.
“The next day there was a headline in the news: ‘Abandoned little girl found in Estonia.’ The baby was found in a stroller. It was so creepy and everybody was talking about it. We thought one little girl is surely important, but how about all the others?”
The campaign ran in March and April across 14 cities in Finland, and by all accounts it was a success, getting lots of public exposure in terms of press coverage, which boosted traffic to the UNICEF web site, along with donations.
Enersen says web traffic grew 1,000 percent in the days immediately following a staging of the baby carriage scene and donations rose 10 percent.
