Agency: dentsumcgarrybowen. Dentsu Studio, Isobar
Client: Dyslexia Canada / Market: Canada
One in five people worldwide has dyslexia, and the neurological condition is not just about jumbled letters or words jumping around on a page. All too often young people with dyslexia are dismissed as being slow or unmotivated. Dyslexia Canada is on a mission to ensure that every child with dyslexia in the country gets a fair and equitable education and =to demonstrate what it is like to have the condition to those who don’t.
Working closely with the charity Dyslexia, we created a campaign to demonstrate that dyslexia is no fairy tale. The It’s Hard to Read campaign rewrites classic children’s fairy tales using words that deliberately complicate the story to overwhelm the reader and highlight the difficulties of dyslexia. The bilingual campaign gives the audience a glimpse of what children with dyslexia experience every day, highlighting that for those with the condition, no story is simple.
The out-of-home and print experiential campaign uses familiar illustrations along with altered titles of classic children’s books: The Three Little Pigs becomes The Triumvirate of Undersized Swine; Goldilocks and the Three Bears is renamed Gilded Coiffure and the Ursine Ternary; while Little Red Riding Hood becomes The Diminutive Crimson-Clad Maiden.
The campaign is accompanied by an immersive new website, itshardtoread.org, which has since been dubbed the hardest website to read in the world. The site aims to help those with dyslexia overcome the learning disability, and properly educate others on the reality of the issue.
“For a person with dyslexia, the printed word can seem like a foreign language that everyone understands but you. Dentsu immediately understood the gravity of the situation and the impact of the lack of awareness and understanding,” says the charity’s founder Keith Gray. “We are grateful for the time dentsu took to really listen and understand that dyslexia is more than just reversing letters or scrambling words.”
The campaign resulted in over 51.3 million radio impressions and 777,000 visits to the new website. A further 2.67 million interacted with outdoor media, while over nine million people were exposed to print coverage of the campaign. This extensive reach has increased much-needed awareness around the issue. In February 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission ruled in favour of Dyslexia Canada, forcing the provincial government to take action to modernise its curriculum with materials and programmes that recognise and help those with dyslexia.
U.S. Pharmaceutical Manufacturer
From a diagnostic and descriptive analysis approach, the solution evolved into a robust advanced analytics omnichannel measurement framework that was proactive and prescriptive in nature.
Suraksha Ka Teeka
As per the Global Fund 2020-22 Report, Malaria is one of the major public health problems in India. With children 5 times more vulnerable to this disease, their cases were witnessing a sudden ou...
The Everything Book
A pioneer in modern education, The Everything Book is an internet signal aggregator. It houses a cloud-based AI packet broadcaster and assembler service that combines weak 2G mobile networks aro...
Foot Locker
Foot Locker is always looking for new ways to innovate and improve the shopping experience for its customers. As a result, the brand asked dentsu gaming to integrate a new augmented reality feat...
DENTSU CREATIVE China: KFC Re:Store
KFC is the largest and most successful restaurant brand in China. Launched in 1987, the brand has grown to encompass over 9,000 stores in 1,600 cities. A steady stream of innovation has kept the...
More Than That with Gia Peppers
Created for Black audiences and produced and distributed exclusively by underrepresented businesses, the series aims to address the inequities in the advertising supply chain by providing a plat...
The story of Siemens and a town’s energy blueprint for th...
Sustainable World
Isobar: The Perfect Candidate – Australian Futures Project
Working with Australian Futures Project, we shifted Australia’s national conversation during election time.
dentsumcgarrybowen: In Love We Trust with Sinyi Realty
Together with dentsumcgarrybowen Taiwan, Sinyi worked to produce “In Love We Trust”, a short film to encourage young Taiwanese to overcome their fear of commitment and to seeking lasting love an...
1st for Women: 16 Days of Light
Diversity and inclusion
FoxP2: First For Women
Fearless
Facing fear to empower women
Merdeka LHS: The Coca-Cola Company
For The Human Race
"For The Human Race" celebrates resilience and stubborn optimism by showcasing true stories of real people bringing hope to humanity during the COVID-19 crisis.
ViiV Healthcare: Delivering Unique Customer Journeys
Disrupting online search results to raise awareness about...
SDG3 target 3.4: by 2030, reduce by one third premature m...
India is the suicide capital of the world. Around 135,000 Indians commit suicide every year, with suicide ranking as the most common cause of death for the age group of 15–39 years. Despite thes...
The Story Lab: Street Stars
Our challenge was clear: To show our clients and media owners that we can attract and therefore monetise the attention of an extremely valuable audience.
FoxP2: IndieFin
For a digital start-up to compete, IndieFin had to rise above the noise and attract leads in a category people usually dread. IndieFin had the tough task of getting a young, digital-savvy genera...
Isobar: Volkswagen
Road Tales
Isobar created a location-based interactive audiobook to transform car rides into magical journeys
Pre-register for our 2019 Digital Society Index
dentsumcgarrybowen: Project Revoice
Activating silent voices with a program to digitally clone ALS patients’ voices so they can keep communicating as themselves even after they can no longer physically speak.
Vizeum: GhanaPostGPS
Generating conversion for GhanaPostGPS through early engagement, awareness and measurable customer actions.