New York City Council

BEHAVIOR CHANGE
PUBLIC AWARENESS
OUT-OF-HOME
SOCIAL MEDIA

We were tasked to create an outdoor and social campaign for City’s First Readers, an initiative of the New York City Council to promote early childhood literacy and close the “word gap” that exists between low-income and affluent families. The campaign not only motivated young parents in disadvantaged communities to read to their children, it also became an exercise for them to start right away as they waited for the bus or subway.

Read The City! launched with the playground scene that I illustrated shown here. Afterward, we worked closely with famed children’s book illustrators/authors Tomie DaPaola and Paul O. Zelinsky to create more scenes and turn Read The City! into a staple for low-income neighborhoods in NYC.

The campaign took approximately 6 weeks to launch from project kickoff and was in market for 4 weeks. The campaign proved effective at creating action and positively influencing the communities we reached:

• Over 15M locally distributed impressions

• 750% increase in Facebook following